HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF AT LOS ANGELES GIFT OF Lewis A. Maverick V woka { HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF' MODERN KNOWLEDGE No. 10 Editors : HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., LL.D., F.B.A. Prop. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN" KNOWLEDGE i6mo cloth, 50 cents net, by mail 56 cents SOCIAL SCIENCE Already Published THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH . . By J. A. Hobson PARLIAMENT: Its History, Con- stitution and Practice By Sir Courtenay P. Ilbeit LIBERALISM By L. T. Hobhousk THE STOCK EXCHANGE . . . . By F. W. Hirst THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT . By J. Ramsay MacDonald THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY By D. II. Macgregor ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW By W. M. Geldart THE SCHOOL : An Introduction to the Study of Education . . . By J. J. Findlay THE IRISH NATIONALITY . . By Mrs. J. R. Green ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY By S. J. Chapman THE NEWSPAPER By G. B. Dibblee CO-PARTNERSHIP AND PROF- IT-SHARING IN INDUSTRY . By A. Williams. Future Issues PRACTICAL IDEALISM .... By Maurice Hewlett THE CRIMINAL AND THE COM- MUNITY By Viscount St. Cyres. TOWN PLANNING By Raymond Unwin. THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENT . . By Tane Addams and R. A. Woods THE NEGRO By W. E. B. Du Bois. POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENG- LAND FROM BACON TO LOCKE By G. P. Gooch, POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENG- LAND FROM BENTHAM TO J. S. MILL By W. L. Davidson. GREAT INVENTIONS . . . . By J. L. Myrks THE CIVIL SERVICE By Graham Wallas ENGLISH VILLAGE LIFE . . . By E. N. Bennett COMMON SENSE IN LAW . . By P. Vinogradoff * THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT BY J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P. AUTHOR OF "SOCIALISM AND GOVERNMENT" M LABOUR AND THE EMPIRE," ETC. " . ■ • ' NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE Copyright, 191 i, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. f^ 01 ■• 9 CONTENTS PAOB Introduction ix SOCIALIST EVOLUTION I Political -«ir •• Mutual Aid 15 t U ii. The Individual in the Community . . 17 ' £ iii. The French Revolution 22 iv. The Century of Individualism ... 26 *5 ^ « Economic and Industrial i. To-day 29 •^ ii. Revolts against Poverty 36 iii. The Rise of Capitalism 41 -^ iv. The fulfilment of Capitalism .... 47 v. The Small Capitalist 51 vi. Summary 54 SOCIALIST CRITICISM III The Economic Failure of Capitalism i. Rent 56 ii. Interest 61 iii. Waste of Capital 64 iv. Waste of Labour 66 v. Poverty 70 268531 vi CONTENTS CHAP. ti.O» IV The Intellect undee Capitalism i. Religion 78 ii. Literature 82 iii. Science 88 iv. Comfort 91 V Summary 94 SOCIALIST CONSTRUCTION VI The Socialist Method i. Utopianism 99 ii. Revolution 103 iii. The Experimental Method 105 iv. The Parliamentary Method 107 v. The Scientific Method 114 VII What Socialism is not i. Anarchism and Communism .... 122 ii. The Abolition of Private Property . . 125 iii. The Negation of Liberty 132 iv. Equality 138 v. Economic Determinism 141 vi. Class War 147 VIII The Immediate Demands of Socialism i. Democracy 150 ii. Palliatives 154 iii. Constructive Legislation 157 iv. Right to Work 163 IX In the Socialist State no i. Ability 171 ii. Artistic Genius 178 iii. Minority Rights 185 iv. Workshop Management 189 CONTENTS vii CHAP. PAS! THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT X The Socialist Movement 195 i. Saint-Simon and Fourier 196 ii, Robert Owen and Chartism 202 iii. Marx and Engels 205 iv. Marxism and Revisionism 210 v. Lasalle and the German Party .... 213 vi. The French Party 217 vii. The Italian Party 221 viii. The Belgian Party 223 ix. The Party in America and other Cou ntries 224 XI The Socialist Movement — (continued) L The British Party 229 ii. The International 235 Conclusion " If Mankind Continue to Improve " . . . 243 Bibliography 249 Index 253 INTRODUCTION One of the greatest of the difficulties which beset the path of the Socialist is the refusal on the part of his opponents to give an accu- rate statement of what Socialism means and what the purpose of Socialism is. The main object of this book is to explain both. The Editors have asked a Conservative to explain Conservatism and a Liberal to interpret Liber- alism, and have on the same principle turned to me to write about Socialism. It is, perhaps, best that doctrines which are the objects of fierce assault should be explained by writers who believe in them, for, whether a doctrine is or is not to have a lasting influence depends not on the success with which clever critics attack some of its outworks, nor on the amount of error which creeps into its popular advocacy, but on the amount of truth which it really con- tains, and that is more familiar to friend than to foe. The Socialist movement has suffered, as all great idealist and Utopian movements have suffered, by having attached to them proposals x INTRODUCTION which do not really belong to them, but which happened to be born and cradled with them. Progress has a habit of bringing forth several babes at the same time. For instance, the earlier advocates of Socialism were found in the more extreme camps of liberal thought in their day. They heralded with unqualified enthusiasm the conquests of science on the field of faith. It was their nature to give no lukewarm welcome to anything that seemed to be a gleam of light on the horizon. Religion in their day was the creed of the rich; churches were built to keep the people quiet; an English reactionary majority in Parliament voted money to tin- Church to help it to stem the rising tide of Radical democracy. The Socialist pioneer went out boldly and challenged all this. He grouped all his enemies in one crowd, all their creeds and professions in one bundle, and he condemned them in the bulk. This happened in other directions, with the result that to-day the opponents of Socialism try to make Social- ism itself responsible for every extravagance, every private opinion, every enthusiasm of every one of its advocates. The logic is this: Mr. Smith writes that the family is only a pass- ing form of organisation; Mr. Smith is a Social- ist; therefore all Socialists think that the family is only a passing form of organisation. This method of controversy may offer for itself a shamefaced justification when it is resorted to for the purpose of a raging and tearing political fight in which the aim of the rivals is not to arrive at truth but to catch votes, but it cannot be defended on any other or higher ground, * INTRODUCTION xi and it requires only the slightest knowledge of the history of opinion in this country to see what havoc would be played with our critics if we were to apply such a perverted logic to them and their creeds. Socialism is the creed of those who, recog- nising that the community exists for the improvement of the individual and for the maintenance of liberty, and that the control of the economic circumstances of life means the control of life itself, seek to build up a social organisation which will include in its activities the management of those economic instruments such as land and industrial capital that cannot be left safely in the hands of individuals. This is Socialism. It is an application of mutual aid to politics and economies. And the Social- ist end is liberty, the liberty of which Kant thought when he proclaimed that every man should be regarded as an end in himself and not as a means to another man's end. The means and the end cannot be separated. So- cialism proposes a change in social mechanism, but justifies it as a means of extending human liberty. Social organisation is the condition, not the antithesis, of individual liberty. Round this conception of the State and com- munity, of mutual aid and of social evolution, many interests cluster. It is like a city towards which roads run from all points of the compass — a pilgrims' way for the devout, a trade route for the merchant, a bridle path for the phil- osopher; and so we have many aspects of So- cialism. We have, for instance, the Independent Labour Party approaching it down political xii INTRODUCTION pathways, the Christian Socialist section, like the Church Socialist League, approaching from religious quarters, scientific Socialist groups, coming by way of biological or other scientific roads, and so on. As time goes on and our industrial experience gets fuller and more accu- rate some of the forecasts made by the earlier Socialists, and some of the forms in which they cast their theories, have had to be modified. Also, advance in one direction opens out other ways of advance hidden until then, and methods change in response. For instance, the Socialists of half a century ago lived when revolution was in the air in Europe and this coloured their statement of the Socialist position. The at- mosphere has changed and so the colour has faded, but Socialism itself remains that concep- tion of the social organisation which I have indicated above. It may save some misunderstanding if I make it clear at the very outset that Socialists do not attack individuals. When they criticise capitah'.m or commercialism they do not con- demn capitalists or business men. On the contrary, they consider that the capitalist is as much the victim of his system as the unem- ployed, and that he has to conform to its evil pressure in the same way as the poverty stricken have to do so. The results are not the same, but they are products of the same social mechan- ism. Socialism deals primarily with the evo- lution of economic relationships and not with the moral nature of man. Of course the prob- lems of society can never be treated as though they were independent of the problems of the INTRODUCTION xiii individual life, but man as a separate indi- vidual, and man in society, present well differ- entiated groups of problems, and Socialism arises in connection with the latter rather than with the former. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT CHAPTER I POLITICAL 1. Mutual Aid. Mutual aid amongst men has played at least as great a part in human history as the struggle for life. Within his clan and tribe the individual has striven for mastery over other individuals. Chiefs have plotted and murdered, thrones have brought many rivals to their steps, and sexual selection has been picking and choosing survivors and offspring since the beginning of time. But this indi- vidual selection has always had a social setting. If it resulted in weakness it was not a man who died but a clan that was swept away; if it resulted in strength it was not a tyrant who was born but a nation that was founded. Ro- mantic history is the story of heroes; scientific history is the story of peoples. The conflicts and movements that make history have been the conflicts and movements of masses and organisations. The colossal historical figure has 15 16 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT been the man endowed with the capacity to gather up in himself the life of his time. For dramatic purposes we think of some Adamic beginning — a desert island, a solitary man, an enemy's footprint on the sand. But whether we are explaining economic or political or ethical laws, we immediately proceed to bring a second man into friendly contact with the first so as to create barter, a market, sub- division of labour, an alliance, mutual interest, for one or other of these things is the driving wheel of progressive change. The wattles are set up and the mound and ditch made, but for the village not for the individual; the castle is built, but to protect the retainers as well as the lord; the king is chosen, but he is the rep- resentative man of his people. Personal power is representative. It is the centre of mass power. Laws are passed and obeyed for the good of the whole, to repress the strong and protect the weak, to punish the dishonest and reward the honest, not at first that individuals may have justice done to them, but that the community may exist and flourish. Concep- tions of individual rights and of justice come much later. The conflict of nations and clans brings feudalism — the organisation of a mass whose existence is threatened and which is threatening the existence of other masses. The subdivisions of labour and responsibility, of power and of honour; the relations of clans- man and chief, of baron and king; the economic structure of slave, chattel slave and lord of the manor, were not the creation of individual will and forethought, but the response to a law of . POLITICAL 17 mutual aid as imperative as that law which determines that the bee must pack its cells as octahedrons and not as cubes. The conception of individual right comes to play a part in history only after social soli- darity has *been secured. Visions of the exist- ence of such a right flash like comets across history long before they enter a system of prac- tical politics. From these visions have come, in our own history, Lollardy, John Ball and the peasant rising, the extreme wings of the Independent schisms during Cromwell's time, the early Socialist agitation; but they were only the dreams of its coming perfection which troubled Society, and they but led to the shed- ding of blood or to the visitation of vengeance by the powers that were. They were not to be understood even, until many generations after their leaders had died, had been lampooned, and had been put, like many another precious thing, on the dust heaps and in the lumber rooms. 1 Social organisation arises to protect the whole, but it is first of all captured by the strong and exploited by them. This double thread of exploitation and revolt against exploi- tation runs right through history. 2. The Individual in the Community. The explanation that these revolts of the oppressed were only the antagonism of a sub- 1 Only yesterday has justice been done to men like John Ball, Jack Cade and Wat Tyler, and the truth has been told about such uprisings as the Peasants' Revolt in England or the Hussite Rebellion in Germany. 18 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT ject and exploited class to a ruling and exploit- ing one lacks historical background, and is therefore inadequate. The exploiting class had a necessary function to perform. If it put a yoke of subjection on the necks of other classes, it was because the organisation which society required in order that it might exist at all, implied such a differentiation into classes, with political and economic inequalities, and conse- quently with opportunities to prey upon the mass and use power for personal and class ends. John Ball's sermons, to the ethics of which no one can take objection, could no more have been carried into effect in the days of the Henrys than the Sermon on the Mount can be carried into effect to-day. On the surface, the whole history of human progress within com- munities and nations is a series of class struggles. Liberty "slowly broadens down" from class to class as the enfranchised sections of the nation tend to become the whole of the nation. In the earlier stages of society the custody of national functions must be in the hands of a few because the military officer is also the polit- ical authority. But when the factory takes the place of the battlefield in national impor- tance, the custodianship of national interests must pass into more hands, and the propertied and middle classes are enfranchised and their economic interests taken special care of. Finally, when the state becomes a democratic organisa- tion and co-operates with the individual in all spheres of his activity, the movement for political democracy has ripened and has produced its natural social fruits. Political power, in the POLITICAL 19 nature of things, must, then, be used for eco- nomic (amongst other) ends. For, whilst the political aim of a class may be power, or honour, or wealth, for the mass of the people there is but one aim possible, a general raising of the standard of life. It has been customary, espe- cially since Maine's time, to consider Democ- racy as nothing but a form of government. That is totally wrong. It is a kind of govern- ment. With a social democracy politics really become national for the first time, and com- munity consciousness takes the place of class consciousness. From this point of view historical evolution assumes a meaning and an interest of special import. We start with the group — originally a family. The solitary individual must have been more brute than man — indeed, the creature that became man had ceased to be solitary. The human group is not the creation of thought but of instinct and habit. Love is historically older than reason. But the group as it becomes older, more fixed and better organised has a double life and function. It protects itself as a group; and in this way it develops a system of government, of ethics, of religion, of defence; it also protects the individual. "For," as Aristotle, who is sometimes claimed as the father of Individualists as Plato is claimed as the father of Socialists, wrote, "as the State was formed to make life possible, so it exists to make life good" {The Politics, Welldon, p. 5). These two purposes run through his- tory, sometimes working in harmony, sometimes appearing in opposition. In the ancient village 20 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT community of India and in some French vil- lages before the Revolution, the group life reached its fullest stage of development. In India, caste brought the individual into a most complete subjection to communal life. From his birth he had his function assigned to him. The sons of carpenters were carpenters, the sons of barbers became barbers. They were not individual workmen at all; they were village functionaries having a share in the village wealth, as an organ of the body has a share in the nutriment and life of the body. They did not receive wages; they had a claim upon communal wealth in a communist way. At the other extreme we have our own modern city where the individual, within certain bounds set by his economic position, whilst obeying codes of law of a social character is free to go and come, to serve and accept service of his own will. Between these two there are many gradations which mark a well-defined historical evolution. Perhaps no code of national law and custom has observed the balance between group life and individual life more successfully than that of Israel. These people were a chosen race, but their religion was as individualistic as it was racial. The individual Jew, unlike the individual Hindu, was never merged in his race. He retained the rights of individuality. And so we have in the Mosaic code and its ampli- fications the most careful safeguards against slavery and a deadening poverty. Every sev- enth year Jewish slaves are liberated; clothes taken in pawn must be restored at the end of POLITICAL 31 the day; every seventh year is a fallow year for the fields when they become common prop- erty; the rights of the people to the soil are protected by legal and religious penalties. The code, it has been frequently argued, partook of some of the qualities of some modern legisla- tion and was more complete on paper than in practice. But be that as it may, here it is, an expression of the sense of justice and an indication of the economic ideals of the religious leaders of the people. As the nation increases in prosperity economic circumstances arise to create a wealthy and luxurious class on the one hand, a poverty-stricken class on the other. The revolt against that is embodied in the writings of the prophets, and they flare with a glow of indignation against the economic disruption of the ancient religious government; they denounce the rich, the man who is adding field to field, the usurers, in language which sounds harsh and wild to us now when it is used to describe our own conditions. The community of Israel with its adjustments of social and individual right and its moral re- straints imposed upon economic processes, went down before a capitalist civilisation, just as the Indian village community is decaying to-day before the advance of Western economic civi- lisation. From this it has been argued that a society organised as Israel was can never survive the assault of a people like our own to-day. But the Socialist reply is that whilst the organisation of Israel could not withstand the world pressure of its time, its spiritual and moral characteristics have always remained as 22 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT enticing ideals in the minds of men, and thereby provide not only a proof that they are to find another opportunity of expression in society, but an earnest that the world pressure will change so as to aid rather than stultify that opportunity. In other words, Socialism reads history in the historical spirit. 3. The French Revolution. The critical point in European history, when the rights of the individual asserted themselves in modern times against an oppressive, because dead, form of social organisation, was the French Revolution. Feudalism had worked itself out. The fighting organisation of the State, by reason of its own success, had enabled new forms of communal activity to grow up under its pro- tecting influence. The life of the community changed its character, and the time had been reached when a new communal organisation was required. The Revolution did not affect France alone, nor did France alone contain the elements which burst out into violence. France happened to be the stage upon which the new life fought for an expression in the most dra- matic way. A forerunner had appeared in Protestantism when individual reason challenged the bondage to which ecclesiastical authority had doomed it. Before Protestantism there was the Renaissance when the mind of the West insisted upon looking upon the world with bare eyes. But Protestantism had carried liberty only up to a certain point. True it had been accompanied by an interesting upstirring of POLITICAL 2S political thought and action, because reason can never be enlivened at one point without feeling the effect in all its activities. Luther was attacked by his enemies in the Diet of Worms for aiding and abetting social disorder; Carlstadt and Mlinzer accused him of not being revolutionary enough. The Kingdom of God was founded by the sword and "the Word" in Miinster. So, too, in our own Puritan times. Democratic doctrine welled up from the same source as religious revivalism. But not until the French Revolution, two centuries and a half later, did the new wine burst the old bottles. Protestant reformations, geographical discovery, the making of roads and the extension of com- merce, the triumph of natural science, the crea- tion of a rich trading class all went to produce it; the special circumstances of France alone determined the stage upon which the blood was to flow and the collapse of the old was to be the most deafening and terrible. The French Revolution paralysed the social organism in order that the rational abstraction "All men are born free and equal" might be proclaimed from the housetops. To begin with, Europe was plunged into wars; European com- munities were cut up and carved according to the vain wills of soldiers and diplomatists; generations had to pass before nations found the boundaries, and citizens the groupings, which were natural to them and within which alone they could develop themselves. Europe took a century to recover from the shock and the shattering which it received when France rose and swept the old away in torrents of blood and by the brute force of armies. 24 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT In Great Britain, where the change took place without disruption, we can trace the current of progress much more easily than we can trace it anywhere else. The man who was to be born "free and equal" was the man of property, the man belonging to the middle class. The richer members of that class had used their wealth particularly during the eight- eenth century for the purposes of political bribery. "To acquire political power at the expense of the country gentlemen was the first and one of the chief causes of that political corruption which soon overspread the whole system of parliamentary government" (History of the Eighteenth Century. Lecky, vol. i. p. 202). The rich man was enfranchised in 1832 and immediately proceeded to settle the politi- cal policy of the State as an honest citizen; his religious views were accepted and he won his religious freedom; his economic interests became predominant. He required only the most rudi- mentary form of social organisation for his protection. An army and navy for big things and a policeman for small things satisfied him. For the rest he only desired to be let alone. He could look after himself. The explanation is that he held enough property to secure to him all the other liberties he required. Markets were good, profits were high, he had a substan- tial balance at his bank. Under these circum- stances, he only wanted the removal of certain old communal restrictions so as to enable him "to be an end in himself." This is the Liberal epoch — the epoch of the government of the man who, having control of the economic forces POLITICAL 25 of his society, finds freedom. Hence, it is the epoch of a political and intellectual individual- ism of the mechanical and not the organic type. It is marked by an extension of commerce, by vast accumulations of wealth, by the creation of commercial empires, by the rapid march of scientific discovery, by the perfecting of the means of production and by the concentration of industrial capital. But, above all, it is dis- tinguished by the growth of political democracy. The actual programme of the French Revo- lution did not include democracy. Rousseau's theoretical sovereignty of the people was to be made subject to important limitations, and it was to control practical policy only at odd moments of sentimental fervour. The fathers of the American Constitution took as much pains to limit democracy as to proclaim it. With ourselves, the Reform Act of 1832 was never intended, at least by its promoters in Parliament, to be a democratic measure — nor a first step towards democracy. It proceeded from the aristocracy and was, at the time, con- sistent with aristocratic government. But some- thing happens with all these beginnings. They have laws of their own being. They tend to fulfil themselves. Their sequel turns out to be the very thing which their authors disclaimed. Man acts; natural law fulfils his action. Thus the offspring of Whiggism is Liberalism, and the child of a reforming aristocracy is democ- racy. Social organisation being for the well- being of the whole community, the will to which it is obedient in its actions must in the end be the will of the community directly expressed 26 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT by majority rule. The political sovereignty by which alone the organisation can act tends to be democratic. 4. The Century of Individualism. The last century in England is known as the century of individualism, because during its two middle quarters in particular the pendulum swung far towards the extreme of individual liberty of the atomic or mechanical kind. The community as an organic unity, as the medium through which individual liberty has to be expressed, became a shadow. The oscillation passed from the hampering organisation of feudalism to the desolating anarchy of laissez /aire. But even during the nineteenth century communal action did not disappear; towards the end of the century, indeed, it became strong. The state had to protect the child from the factory, then the woman, then the young person; it had to provide education; it had to impose responsibilities like Employers' Liability and Workmen's Compensation upon the "free" em- ployers; it had to regulate hours and conditions of labour; it had to legislate on matters of housing and public health. At the same time municipalities had to provide their own water, gas and tram services, their own houses, their own works departments, and, turning their attention to other interests, they had to open libraries, museums, art galleries, and arrange for concerts and recreations for their citizens, who, but for communal action, would have V POLITICAL 27 been kept away from culture altogether. Thus at the moment of the greatest triumph of an- archist individualism, the fact that man is a social being and that the mutual aid of a com- munity is.a necessary factor in individual liberty and progress, was asserting itself. The individualism of the nineteenth century was indeed only a reaction from feudalism. At no time was it able to rule alone. When uncontrolled, it worked fearful havoc as is shown in the early chapters of our factory life. We are now at that point where these experi- ences are being systematised. They are no longer being regarded as the few exceptions to the working of another policy. They are be- coming the main policy itself. We are being guided by the thought that individualism l requires for its maintenance and development a well-organised and active state which will be the communal personality owning property, educating and controlling the individual, guard- ing his liberties, preventing the growth of eco- nomic interests antagonistic to him, co-ordinating those co-operative activities in which he must engage in order that he may be free and have the widest rational field in which to enjoy his liberty. W r e are not to go back to feudalism or to the village community. Were that so, 1 1 do not like to use this word because it is so mislead- ing. When used as the antithesis of Socialism, the word means mechanical or anarchist individualism; Socialism is itself a theory of individualism because socialists contend that only under Socialism will men be free. For convenience, however, I use individualism in the popular slip-shod way as the opposite of Socialism, because no other handy word will serve my purpose. 28 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT no time need be wasted by any one in con- sidering our proposals. He who seeks to turn back the leaves of history may be disregarded. The epoch of caste, of status, of silent and subordinate classes, is over. The individual, clothed in the equality which is the consequence of the Kantian ethical precept that every man has the right to be treated as an end in him- self, has arisen. For him we have to provide a social system, for he, too, is gregarious and not solitary. He has the communal as well as the individualist personality. Hence it is that the French Revolution and the general move- ment of the human spirit to which it was a response, have handed over to us the task of reconciling individual right and communal ac- tivity, individual freedom and social organisa- tion, democracy and differentiation of political functions. At this historical point socialism is born, and its task is to effect the reconciliation. * CHAPTER II ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL Socialism is sometimes presented as though it were nothing but a proposal to make such economic changes in social structure as would eliminate poverty. This is only a partial state- ment of socialist aims, and yet it is true that the prevalence of excessive wealth and exces- sive poverty side by side is one of the chief causes of the success of the socialist propaganda. 1. To-day. Every town in the country affords some example of this contrast; every commercialist country in the world adds details to the picture. Apologis's of the existing order sometimes excuse it, sometimes say that the individual is to blame, sometimes try and show that things are getting better. Mr. Mallock has been making guesses about family incomes recently for the purpose of showing that they are now fairly substantial and are rising. 1 When the family income is not that of the "breadwinner" alone, it is a 1 The Nation as a Business Firm. 29 30 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT very flimsy foundation to give to progress. But even on such a foundation, strengthened as much as possible by generous estimates and by inadmissible statistical methods, Mr. Mallock has to admit that 350,000 families, containing 1,750,000 persons, have a total family income of £30 per annum — a sum which works out at a fraction over 2s. 3d. per head per week from which everything must be paid. There are in addition 1,200,000 with an average family income of £94 per annum. In this figure Mr. Mallock includes the incomes of the members of these families who are living out as domestic servants! Without them, the income is £71 or about 6s. per head per week, an altogether unsatisfactory figure and a somewhat miserable one even if it were earned by a single breadwin- ner. It is quite inadequate for bringing up a family. It gives no margin for sickness and unemployment, and from it can hardly be taken a rent sufficient to keep a comfortable house over the heads of the group. It certainly is insufficient to bear the cost of that innocent recreation and luxury which go to improve the quality of life. Mr. Mallcok is an apologist, and his estimates must be accepted with appro- priate care, but he has signally failed to dis- prove the assertions that a substantial percent- age of our people have incomes inadequate to enable them to attend to their animal wants satisfactorily, and that a great part of our pov- erty arises not from uneconomical expenditure but from insufficient income. Fortunately figures of greater scientific value than Mr. Mallock's are at our disposal. Mr. ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 31 Booth's and Mr. Rowntree's investigations have become so familiar that they hardly bear quot- ing. Mr. Booth found 35.2 per cent, of the people of the north and east of London living on a family income of under a guinea per week; Mr. Rowntree found that of the people of York nearly 30 per cent, were "living in poverty." Investigations in West Ham showed that only in a small percentage of cases did married women engage in home work when their hus- bands were earning enough to keep their fami- lies. 1 Inquiries conducted in Dundee, 2 Nor- wich, 3 and elsewhere substantiate the same conclusions. Many other sets of figures com- piled by different methods are available and their meaning cannot be doubted. For instance an investigation by Commissioner Cadman, late of the Salvation Army, found that amongst the lowest down of their clientele, 55.8 per cent, had lost their grip on decency owing to depres- sions in trade and 11.6 because they could not tide themselves over periods of sickness. These facts are true of every industrial coun- try. Great numbers of people are forced to live on incomes which are insufficient to enable them to make good their daily physiological waste and meet the ordinary accidents of life like sickness and unemployment. But we can turn to another group of facts, and get another body of evidence in our sup- port. The wages of the woollen operatives in 1 West Ham: A Study. By E. G. Howarth and Mona Wilson. 2 Report on Housing, &c, in Dundee. 3 Norwich: A Social Study. By C. B. Hawkins. 32 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT Yorkshire have advanced but slightly since 1871, in some of the leading centres like Brad- ford, Leeds, Batley and Dewsbury, they have actually receded since 1874. 1 Mr. Wood has shown that for about half a century, up to 1900, wages in the following trades have not advanced: ironfounders in Warrington, Not- tingham, London, Birmingham; engineers in Wolverhampton; compositors in Iluddersfield, Manchester, Reading; masons, painters, plas- terers, slaters, coopers, in the South of Scot- land; ship-painters in Hull, and so on. 2 Then if we turn to the figures published by the Board of Trade year by year, 3 they show that at tin- end of 1900, amongst the larger groups of labour, excluding agricultural labourers, sean and railway servants, nearly £100,000 per week less were paid in wages than in 1900, whilst increases in 1910 only improved the 1909 figures by £14,000, so that the workers to-day are still well over ISO, 000 per week less well off in respect to wages than they were in 1900. Every reliable investigation that has been conducted into our Bocia] conditions reveals an appalling amount of poverty and a still more appalling bitterness in the struggle for life under sordid and heartless conditions. Practically the whole of the vital energy of more than half of our people is consumed in providing bread and butter for their stomachs and a shelter 1 See an interesting article on the subject in the Socialist Review, Nov. 1910, By Henry Willmott. 1 Economic Journal, xi., pp. 151-6. * Report on the Changes in Hales of Wages and Hours of Labour. ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 33 for their heads, and then they do not always succeed. 1 Nor is the reply that poverty is a self-inflicted wound very decisive. It is true that drunken- ness brings misery upon individuals. The waste- ful man must come to grief whether he be rich or poor. But intemperance — to select only the most frequently discussed source of personal poverty — is not the cause of social poverty. Its chief effect is to select the vietims of pov- erty. For there come to all slackness of work and misfortunes of many kinds, and the most that thriftless expenditure does is to determine who are to be completely, and who partially, wrecked in the hard times. It is said that if every penny which finds its way into the pockets of rich and poor were well spent, every man would face the rainy day with an umbrella over his head, and the slack time with some- thing in the savings bank. Only to a small extent is this true. The best form of saving which the majority of our working classes can practise is the art of useful expenditure upon themselves and their families. Their incomes are too small to bear any other form of thrift. The reason why so many of those who practise 1 American conditions, despite the newness of the country and the vast extent of its territory, show the same features. One-eighth of the families of the I'uited States enjoy seven- eighths of the wealth of the country; and investigations conducted by the New York State Conference of Charities and Correction in 1906-7, by the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics and by private inquirers in other states show that great masses of the town workers of America have incomes which come considerably below the efficient sub- sistence minimum. 34 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT thrift — meaning by that, saving — are unattrac- tive and even repulsive, is that they have not spent enough on themselves to allow their per- sonalities to grow. They have been banking not real savings but capital which they ought to have spent on their personal development. They are hampering their own growtli by choos- ing to remain under-nourished — especially in mind. The true practice of thrift for a man with a family and thirty shillings per week as an income, is not niggardly saving but wise expenditure. Such expenditure would increase the volume of demand for productive labour, but it would not put an end to unemployment or to slack times and sickness. During these times the thriftless man will suffer most, be- cause he has probably destroyed his nerve and skill and is unreliable to boot, and because he i^ exposed straight away to the full blast of the cutting wind of adversity. Hut the tem- perate man is also discharged, and if he may be rarely seen in unemployed marches, he is found by those who know how to seek him in his seelusion, before a cold grate and an empty home. The cause of poverty is social; but personal conduct often determines whether this man or that is to be the victim and how deep the poverty is to be. Statistics on such an intricate subject as the play and counter-play of social and personal causes of poverty are of course difficult to com- pile. But various authorities have attempted to supply them. Commissioner Cadman says that 26.6 per cent, of those who come to Sal- vation Army Homes have been wrecked finan- ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 35 cially by drink and gambling. Mr. Rowntree commits himself to no figures regarding York, but puts drink and gambling, together with bad housekeeping, as the first of the causes which produce secondary poverty from which 13,000 persons out of a total poverty-stricken population of 20,000 are suffering. Mr. Charles Booth worked out, from a certain number of investigated families, that 14 per cent, of the A and B classes of poverty was caused by per- sonal habits, and 13 per cent, of classes C and D, whilst "conditions of employment" ac- counted for 55 and 68 per cent, of the poverty in these classes respectively. I would be the last to seek to diminish the evils of drunken- ness, but it must be reduced to its proportions. The Socialist movement in practically every country in the world has declared war upon drink, and at the International Congress at Stuttgart the question was considered. Nor must it be forgotten that the effect of social pressure is to increase the activities of those cravings and appetites which reduce individual efficiency and so create individual poverty. Did not the worldly-wise writer of the Proverbs l say: "Let him drink and forget his poverty and remember his misery no more." As we have traced the rise of the democratic state, so we must now trace the rise of the modern industrial state, of which this poverty is a result, and from which the way to Socialism opens out. 1 Chap. xxxi. 7. 36 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 2. Revolts against Poverty. Just as we have seen that the demand for individual freedom disturbed the feudal com- munity, so do we find that the prevalance of poverty led to protests against economic changes which sometimes ended in riot, but which some- times produced Utopias. So long as the man was a serf or was a charge OD the soil, his pov- erty was accepted as his lot, because it rarely became so oppressive a> to be intolerable. It was lii- status. He had his bed and his food and his clothes, and he expected nothing more. But the economic state of villeinage had to pass. Commerce grew between market and market, ami country and euimtry. Profits were made l>v bankers, mannfaet nrers and mer- chants. The aristocracy planted on the land temlnl to decay <>n account of new economic and political conditions and the consequent rise of a plutocracy of wealth; and the personal relations between squire and cottar tended to disappear as new ways of using land, which were more profitable to the owners than the old ways, offered themselves. As some writer once said: Agriculture from being the winning of subsistence became a making of profits. In addition to this, as peace began to settle in the land, the old aristocracy had to resort to extrav- agant expenditure in order to keep up appear- ances. Their work was done and they had to fall back upon badges as a sign of authority and status. This meant money, whilst their old economic relations meant comparatively ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 37 small personal incomes. So they had to employ their lands in such a way as would yield them a higher revenue. Thus, whilst standing by all the outward appearances and the political and social- structure of feudalism, the landed classes abandoned their social relationships and followed more and more closely the profit- making ways of the capitalism which was coming to rule the land. The first uprising of the poverty-stricken in England came from famine and preaching. Whilst the third Edward was glorying in his shameful extravagances and follies, the shadow of plague was creeping westward over Europe. At the end of 1348 it fell upon England. Half the population died and social life was para- lysed. The fields returned to their original wildness. The very beasts sickened and died too. After the horror came reaction. For a long time the workman had been drifting towards the status of a hired labourer, and was being pushed into the position of a landless and propertyless man without a guardian. After the plague, he found himself in an advanta- geous position, for he was a man whose services were sought, and not one who was trying to find an employer. He forced up his wages; in his moods of sportive independence or care- less laziness he became a "sturdy beggar." But he was not allowed to enjoy the advan- tages of his economic position for long. Legis- lation in the form of the Statute of Labourers thrust him back into his subordinate and ser- vile status. His political impotence rendered his economic strength useless. Civil discord 26853 1 38 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT ensued. A thousand grievances added fuel to the fire. The memory of generations of hardship such as is described by the authors of Piers Plowman put rebellion in the hearts of the people, and the disturbances called the Peasants' Revolt occurred. A similar state of things occurred a century and a half later, in the time of Henry VIII. Ecclesiastical property had been secularised and it bore no longer its heavy burden of charity. As in the days of the Peasants' Rising religion inflamed want and quickened a sense of injus- tice. The land labourer had become free, and had found that freedom meant that he was allowed to wander on the roads and starve. Il<- now had no certain income. Lands were let for sheep rearing, common fields and wastes were enclosed, tillage was being greatly reduced. An address to the king and parliament, written at tlit* middle of the sixteenth century, tells how there were "fewer plows by forty in Ox- fordshire. Each plow kept six persons. Now then- is nothing but sheep. These 240 persons must live — where shall they go? Some of these are driven to beg, some to steal." l A revolu- tion, greater than the later change which is known as the Industrial Revolution, then hap- pened. "The production of wealth, instead of being merely a means of subsistence, became an end in itself or a means to political influence." The spirit of commercialism had taken a firm hold of England. The landlords laid their hands on every acre they could appropriate, and imposed as large rents upon them as they 1 Early English Text Society, Extra Series, XJH. ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 39 could get. Employers placed impediments in the way of their journeymen starting in busi- ness, substituted juveniles for journeymen, and concentrated their attention on their bank balances.* Rents were raised, wages reduced, privileges curtailed. In the introduction to his Utopia, Sir Thomas More describes the state of the people. The rich kept a train of idle serving men, and turned the poor who became sick or old out of doors because they could not maintain both. Thus the number of robberies increased. The poor man grew ragged and pale-faced, and then no one would employ him. The argument that large numbers of fighting men had to be maintained is ridiculed by More, and met. Both in the statement and the reply these paragraphs are wonderfully modern. But the greatest grievance of all was: "Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers, and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses and cities: for look, in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest, and therefore dearest wool — there noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, not being content that they live in rest and pleasure, nothing profiting — yea, much noy- ing the weal-public, leave no ground for tillage: they inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave noth- 40 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT ing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep-house." The increasing numbers of sheep did not, however, lead to a reduction in the price of wool or of mutton, because "they be almost all come into a few rich men's hands." It was also more profitable to buy store cattle abroad and fatten them in England, and this, too, meant less work and village depopulati on. "Thus, t lie unreasonable covetousneas of a few hath turned that thing to the utter undoing of your inland, in the which thing the chief felicity of your realm did consist." More refers to hospitality, which the poor could no longer afford and the rich wne making too lavish and vicious. This i^ the opening of a new epoch in the history of English poverty. The landless man appears for good. The ownership of the soil no longer carries with it the heavy social obli- gations to maintain men on it. The labourer becomes ;i mere convenience in profit making, to be employed when it suits the landlord and farmer, and to be turned upon the road when his labour is not profitable. Moreover, both preceding the Black Death and in the time of Sir Thomas More, the griev- ances of urban unemployment had been felt. Parliament had to consider it, and in More's days there was an agitation, which smacks of very modern error, on the ground that English- men were being supplanted by foreigners, and there were, also very appropriately to complete a parallel with modern conditions, May Day riots in London. But one other epochal change had to pass ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 41 over England before Socialism arose. England had to undergo the Industrial Revolution. The world had to become the market for our goods and the source of our supply of food and raw material. The forces of nature had to be harnessed to production, and mechanical contrivance had to supplement manual labour. The people had to be ingathered into great centres, their labour had to be subdivided and co-ordinated in great factories. Capital had to be concentrated and the day of the large industry come, before Socialism, as a scientific hope and a practical guide, was possible. 3. The Rise of Capitalism. The Industrial Revolution is the term applied to the change which came over industry when mechanical appliances led to the factory sys- ttem and the specialising of factory labour. There were rich men before that happened, but they belonged to the class of merchants and financiers rather than to that of manu- facturers. And when the Industrial Revolution came, the manufacturer was not specially wealthy. He lived, as a rule, like a workman enjoying a substantial income. But wealth rap- idly accumulated in his hands. He drew away, both in his social status and his ideals, from the people from whom he came. He formed a plutocratic class all by himself. The influence of the change was enormous. The aristocracy opened its doors to the new rich, for the aris- tocracy needed money. The exploiters of the virgin soil of America, its speculators, its finan- 42 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT ciers, supplied the incomes which our aristoc- racy required; our own rich families acquired titles. Nominally birth was retained as the hall mark of aristocracy, but wealth was in reality its foundation. Thus it has come about that the social effect of the Industrial Revolu- tion has been the establishment of customs and distinctions which depend solely upon the pos- session of wealth, and which have led to the use of that wealth in selfish and anti-social directions. Wealth divorced from social respon- sibility, but held and used purely as a personal session, has divided society into the two great separate kingdoms of rich and poor, each Giving its own life and very rarely coming into <• mtacl with the Other. Slumming, charitable activities, patronising interferences, have taken the place of those personal relationships which used to exist between hut and hall before the feeling of BOcial solidarity was destroyed by a huge factory and town population, the clear- ance of the people from the soil, and the class distinctions which became the chief desire of the plebeian rich. Thus public spirit and re- sponsibility have become weakened, and we have less guarantee than ever that the control of wealth is to be other than purely selfish. Moreover, whilst the moral relationships be- tween rich and poor have been weakening, the power of wealth has been increasing by leaps and bounds. This increase must be traced out, as it is an important link in the chain of socialist evolution. Although the conflict between capital and labour began very early in our industrial his- ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 43 tory, and the employer never seems to have been unwilling to beat down wages to competi- tive levels, 1 it was not till the eighteenth century had well advanced to its close that the two classes of capitalists and workmen became sepa- rated; that the journeyman began to become obsolete, and that the chance of a substantial proportion of the wage-earners becoming em- ployers in due time tended to disappear. Me- chanical invention increased the amount of capital required in business, the extension of the market intensified competition, and led to the organisation of a huge and a complicated system of exchange, factory-methods of work narrowed the skill and the outlook of the wage- earners; thus the separation between the two economic classes became permanent and well- defined. In the days of the hand-loom and the spinning-wheel there were poverty, child labour, and social distress, but the conditions under which they occurred were not so crushing, and they did not throw such a long and a black shadow across extended periods of life as they were destined to do later. The history of this movement of the separa- tion of economic classes is, first of all, a history 1 For instance, Maeaulay refers in his History of England (vol i., p. £04) to a ballad sung on the streets of Leeds and Norwich and now preserved in the British Museum, as "the vehement and bitter cry of labour against capital. It describes the good old times when every artisan employed in the woollen manufacture lived as well as a farmer. But these times were past. Sixpence a day was now all that could be earned by hard labour at the loom. If the poor complained that they could not live on such a pittance, they were told that they were free to take it or leave it." 44 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT of the guilds. Originally a commercial union with religious sentiments and some political powers, the growing division of function between capital and labour destroyed the industrial catholicity of the first type of guild, the mer- chant guild, and raised opposition to it amongst the craftsmen. To begin with, the craftsmen won, but the gulf between the capitalist who had wealth, and the labourer who had only skill widened apace, and the guilds again drifted into positions of economic privilege and antag- onised the poorer workmen. The merchant guild had given place to the craft guild, quali- fication for membership in which consisted mainly in having served an apprenticeship to a craft or mystery. The function of the guild Was to regulate the trade in the interest of the craftsmen. But all such organisations have an evolution. They arise to satisfy a need; they succeed; they decay through a period of abuse. Thus it happened that the craft guild, too, became a close corporation, and its powers to regulate trade were used for the purpose of securing monopolies — a movement exactly par- allel to that of modern capitalism, though the methods differ. For two centuries, ending about the middle of the sixteenth, the craft guild rose and sank. Outside it had grown up a new class of men who depended upon hire, who were not a craft aristocracy, who could neither amass money nor gather together stock, who had no land and who often worked with supplied capi- tal. The guilds interfered with this class, not for the purpose of helping it, but of suppressing it. Entrance fees were raised against it. By ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 45 the end of the fourteenth century, the journey- men, accepting their status as the final one, which they were likely to experience, and, assuming that the crafts were barred against them, had formed some fraternities of their own. 1 By' the middle of the sixteenth century the guild had broken down, and legislation began to take the place of its statutes. But the landless and property less hired servant became common, and he in turn formed his guild in the shape of a trade union, when the factory system and the town system gave him a chance to do so, and the final separation of the labour and the capitalist classes compelled him to abandon the assumption that his industrial advancement was more likely than not. The employer had moved into another social stra- tum, and "born a workman, die a workman" became the guiding thought of the labourer's life. Up to the time of the Industrial Revolution the capitalist producing class was not a rich class. The industrial system was then domes- tie, and the craftsmen, as a rule, owned their own tools, just as a carpenter owns his kit to-day. The competition of the power-loom with the hand-loom in cotton manufacture was not severe up to 1812, and as late as 1834 there were only 733 power-loom workers to 7,000 or 8,000 hand-loom workers. In the woollen 1 In 1387 the "serving men of the London eord-wainers " were accused of trying to form an independent fraternity, and similar complaint was made against the saddlers in 1396, and in 141.3 against the tailors. (Webb, History of Trade Unionism, pp. 2-3.) 46 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT and linen industry power-looms were in little use before 1840. In spinning, mechanical power and factory conditions came somewhat earlier. In ls:;:'> there were three spinning mills in Man- chester, employing 1,400 hands each, eight em- ploying from 500 to 900, eight from :500 to 500, and 17 from 100 to .".00.' Mr. Andrew, in his Annals of Oldham, tells of his uncle, who owned a carding engine in a factory (power was then let out to individual owners of engines some- thing in the way that power i- still let out to the owners of stands in Sheffield cutlery work- shops in ISO!*, and who created "a great hue and cry in the town" whin he became the owner of a second. Professor Marshall illustrates this point by comparing the relative value of tools ami wages now and formerly. The textile operative used to employ tools equivalent in price to but a few month- of hi- labour, whilst in modern times there is ; , capital in plant of about £200 for each man, woman and child in a textile factory. The cost of a steam ship is equiva- lent to the price of the labour for ten years i ! those who work her. whilst the railway ser- vants operate capital valued at perhaps twenty years of their w In 1M."> MVulloch esti- mated that the fixed capital in good cotton mills was no more than equal to two years' wages of an operative; Marshall's figures work out at five years' wages. This brings us to a new stage. 1 Butterworth. History of Oldham, p. 118. 1 Principles of Economics, pp. 302-3, 4th edition. ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 47 4. The Fulfilment of Capitalism. The increase in the amount of capital used led to a revolution in the ownership of it. In- dustrial capital used to he owned by those who used it. The employer was the capitalist. But obviously one man cannot own the Mid- land Railway, or one of the huge modern en neering concerns 1 i k<- Armstrong, Whitworth & Co. So it has inevitably happened that the capital required for these huge undertakings is procured from a wide area <»f capitalists. Thus the limited liability, or joint .stock, company arose to mark a further stage in capitalist evolution. The constitution of these companies is quite familiar. Their capital is raised in the form of shares, it is controlled by a board of direc- tors, generally by a managing director, and those who have provided it have practically no voice in the management of the business. Shareholders' meetings are held occasionally, but apart from the fact that many shareholders never attend these meetings, the power which the shareholder has does not amount to much more than to express gratitude or to grumble. Except at a crisis the directors, working within the bounds of the articles of association, hold an absolute authority. Thus, one of the first results of the concen- tration of capital in industrial undertakings has been the supplanting of the individual and responsible capitalist by the official agent who represents many capitalists. The "captain of 48 TIIE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT industry" is thus no more a man working with his own capital, but an agent working with other people's capital, and the capitalist him- self is ceasing to be a business man and is be- coming a mere financier. This change from personal to impersonal capitalism, from own- ership control to agency control, is another important link in the chain of socialist evolution and argument. One erroneous deduction from this change ought to be disposed of at once. It is often assumed that under a system of joint stock companies the dividends and profits previously madt by a small class of industrial capitalists are spread over a wider field, and a better national distribution is thus secured. Elderly ladies with small savings get an income from building societies, clergymen eke out modest incomes derived from their calling by sharing in the profits of brewery companies and tied houses, clerks dabble in the gains of rubber companies, and so on. This, however, does not mean nearly so much as appears on the face of it. The list of shareholders in public companies \a long, but the duplicates are enor- mous. No thorough attempt has ever been made to eliminate these duplicates so that we may know what number of separate individuals have invested their money in these companies, but, judging from one's personal knowledge, the net number of investors must be very sub- stantially smaller than the gross number. The shareholding financier in his turn becomes a class with a solid nucleus of great controlling magnates and a more or less unimportant fringe of comparatively poor people. ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 49 Moreover, it is clearly proved by every official and reliable publication that wealth continues to accumulate at one end of society, and that whilst the middle slowly improves, the other extreme is either stationary or is losing ground. Thus, on 'an average for the five years up to 1903-4 l the net value of dutiable estates left at death was £'-276,000,000, and of these only 17,000 were of less value than £100. For 1 1 it- year 1909-10, the net value of these estates was £283,660,000, and the total of the 71 estates of a quarter of a million and over was not less than £59,160,000. Though it is true that over long periods the condition of the better class of artisan and the lower middle class improves, it is subject to considerable fluctuation owing to times of unemployment and bad trade, and to increases in the cost of living. To-day, at the end of 1910, these middle social strata are not so well off as they were at the beginning of the century. There have been losses in wages and rises in prices in the interval, and rents continue to take more and more out of working-class pockets. Relatively to the mod- ern combinations of capital, combinations of labour tend to weaken, and the upward pressure which the workman can exert on his status is less effective than it was. Nor must we forget that the joint stock com- pany means that every industrial improvement is capitalised, and that, in consequence, the amount of capital borne by industry tends to keep pace with profits so that labour finds it increasingly difficult to secure an improving 1 Richet and Poverty, p. 48, Chiozza-Money. 50 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT share in national wealth. Any successful lim- ited liability company supplies an illustration of this argument. Let us suppose that a com- pany is floated with a capital of i>20,000, and that it pays a dividend of 10 per cent. Under the old system of the employing capitalist, a portion of this 10 per cent, was available for increased wages. But under the public company system a shareholder Bella his snares at perhaps double the price he paid for them. Thus, although the business has never absorbed more than a capital of £90,000, it is in reality carrying ■ boroen <>f £40,000; nominally it is paying 10 net cent., it ii actually paying its new shareholders only 5 per cent. The margins arc immediately capitalised; profits are not available for improving the business itself, nor for increasing the wages of the employ rapid capitalisation acta ai a >ponge and sinks up the life sap of the enterprise. This can be Been by the study of any handbook on public companies which gives the actual dividends paid on the current price of stock. These figures work out at something about 4 per cent. Over-capitalisation is the aired result of the joint stock phase of capitalist control. It has been estimated that the over-capitalisation of American railroads is from 50 to 200 per cent. of their actual value. The Sugar Refining Company is capitalised at three or four times its actual value, the Felt Company at ten times, the Steel and Wire Company at three times, the Standard Oil Company at six times. Our own large companies are not quite so free to over-capitalise themselves as those of America, ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 51 owing to our Free Trade system, but our rail- ways, our shipping combines, our large stores, some of our manufacturing trusts, are carrying far too heavy financial responsibilities, and the public suffer greviously in consequence. Thus the weight of capital on industry be- comes excessive, the exploiting investor becomes all-powerful, and though the statistics of in- comes may improve in appearance, as a matter of fact a system of distribution is being estab- lished which must ultimately produce impov- erishment for every creative factor in national prosperity. 1 5. The Small Capitalist. In this way the trust grows and another stage begins. Capital is carnivorous and preys upon itself. Competition is self-destructive.-' A 1 This was never put with more honest and callows candour than by the President of tin- American Sugar Trust, Mr. II. 0. Bavemeyer, when examined before the American Industrial Commission. "The policy <>f the American Sugar Refining Company." be Said, "is to protect its trade, and if it resulted in crushing a competitor it is no concern of the American Company; if be gets in the press, that is bis affair, DOt ours." Then he was asked: "Ami if any one interferes with the business, profits, or competition of the American Sugar Refining Company, it is its policy to prevent it if possible?" He answered: "By lowering profits to defy it." "And if it results in crushing him out?" "That is his affair." * Perhaps the most conclusive proof of this argument has been supplied by Mr. Mallock in a book written with the intention of disproving it. In The Xation as a Business Firm, Mr. Mallock analyses national income for the purpose of showing that it is better distributed than it was, and that those who have told us that it is very inequitably dis- 52 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT point is reached in the concentration of capital when war between rival firms entails such loss and such risk that peace is signed between them. They either define the limits of their activities, as a certain well-known thread combine has divided the great markets of the world between its various sections, or they pool their profits or come to some other mutual arrangement regarding their disposal, or they amalgamate under one management like the American Steel Trust. They also proceed to control subsidiary industries — as the Steel Trust controls not only rolling mills and furnaces, but iron ore quarries and steamship and railway lines required for the transport of its material. So the grip of capital upon industry tightens, and the empire of finance widens. We are sometimes told that along with this concentration there is also a growth of small businesses. But regarding this point, two ob- servations have to be made. A great bu'k of these businesses are casual. They are kept going by consumers who have special needs — little shops keeping open late, shops that give credit, shops that deal in special lines, small manufacturers who for some reason or other tributed are wrong. He deals with family incomes only. This in itself is open to grave objection from the scientific point of view, and he further stretches figures and argu- ments in order to make his families as affluent as he possi- bly can. But what are his conclusions? They are that 855,000 rich people take £400,000,000 per annum, that 12,150,000 comfortable people take £571,000,000, and that 29,895,000 wage-earners take £773,000,000 per annum. This apology for the existing order sounds little better than a confession of the truth of all the condemnations that have been uttered against it. ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 53 produce economically, or who are engaged in work that does not require much capital or that does not depend upon machinery, or that is artistic and, therefore, individual and not mechanical in its nature. The second obser- vation is that the small capitalist, even though he may increase in numbers, diminishes in industrial importance. More and more abso- lute in trade and commerce becomes the rule of the large capitalist, the syndicate, the trust, the universal provider. He will never gather all trade unto himself. Indeed, one can foresee that with an improvement in taste and a strength- ening of individuality, machine production of articles of personal use will diminish rather than increase; but even then, the facilities for transport and the convenience of great central stores, like the modern Whiteley's, will secure the survival of capitalist concentration in the distribution of these articles of taste, and a concentrated system of distribution will secure a concentrated system of production. For in- stance, the "artistic' productions in cabinet- making sold in some of our department stores are made in workshops which themselves are small, but which depend for their existence solely upon the patronage of these stores. The warehouse system in the boot and shoe trade is of the same nature. Hundreds of small manu- facturers bring their products once, or oftener, a week to these buying warehouses connected with thousands of centrally controlled shops open all over the country. The manufacturer remains a "small" man, he depends upon the warehouses for his existence, he is generally 54 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT financed by them, his profits are often not more than wages, he is practically in the posi- tion of an employee, his profits are cut down by an operation of economic law which, in re- spect to him, is far less curbed and controlled than it is in respect to the ordinary factory workman who is a member of a trade union. The statistics of independent capitalists and employers must therefore be read with much reservation, or they will convey very false meanings. 6. Summary. We are now in a position to summarise the processes of the evolution of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution, and to state the law of thai evolution. Capitalist industry begins with competition, and the law of the survival of the fittest comes at once into operation. From this emerges the law of concentration and co-ordination. Com- petition ends in the domination of the sur- viving few, and in the widening of the sphere of control of the capitalist unit. Trades which depend upon each other tend to be organised together and to be controlled as one unit. But whilst this concentration of control is proceeding, the employer working with his own capital tends to disappear; the investor comes upon the stage, industrial capital is drawn, not from one bank balance but from many bank balances, and the control of industrial capital, and hence of industry, passes into the hands of agents. The industrial mechan- ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL 55 ism ceases to be personal and becomes imper- sonal. It is a hierarchy of managers and directors. That is the law of capitalist evolution, and at that ' point we now find ourselves. The problem with which we are faced is not how to maintain competition, but how to control monopoly. CHAPTER III THE ECONOMIC FAILURE OF CAPITALISM We are now in a position to discuss the prac- tical working of capitalist industry. We start from the assumption that the processes of pro- duction arc undertaken for the purpose of min- istering to the needs of the people. Clothes arc made to clothe, houses to house, food prep- aration^ to feed; the products of foreign lands are imported to add to our comforts. The test which musl be always imposed upon any sys- tem of production is: Does it fulfil those ends? And that musl i>e supplemented by another test: Does the system under consideration do it> work economically or wastefully? Let us apply the second test first of all. 1. Rent. We shall arrive at clear ideas on this point most readily and conveniently if we consider how various economic classes gain an income, and we shall deal with the owner of land — the rent receiver — first of all. Income from land is not of the nature of reward for services rendered. It used to be. Land was granted by the sovereign to his captains who, in return for their possessions, rendered military service to the state, and in 56 FAILURE OF CAPITALISM 57 addition paid certain taxes so as to provide the king — who was the embodiment of the state — with what income he required. The land was then held in trust for the state, and that theory underlies the whole of our ancient land legislation and taxation. But as the character of the state changed, the land-owning trustee was transformed — or, strictly speaking, trans- formed himself — into an ordinary owner. His obligations were diminished and disappeared, his special taxation was whittled down and, though legal and judicial theory retained its ancient assumptions, the practice grew up of treating the land as the subject of ordinary private possession. Now, it is from the land that we derive all the primary raw materials. It is the soil which the agriculturist needs, it contains the ores and the minerals of all our vast mining, quarry- ing, smelting trades; upon it must be built our factories, our warehouses, our houses; it is still, with the exception of the high seas, the foundation of our transport industry. If it were closed against us, every industry in the country would be paralysed and we should die. Upon this fact, income from land de- pends. "I can prevent you from working, from building, from mining, from living," says the landowner. "From the proceeds of our labour and our skill," reply the rest of the community, "we are willing to pay you to allow us to work, and build, and mine, and live." And so rent is paid and the landowner gets an income. It was Adam Smith who wrote: "Rent is not at all proportioned to what the landlord 58 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take, but to what the farmer can afford to give." l Some parts of the land have special values. Some land adjoins rivers, like the sites of Lon- don and Liverpool. The transport trades must use it or nothing at all. Rutland is useless for shipping companies; the marshes around Leices- ter cannot be turned into docks. Some land contains certain minerals. Middlesex is of no value to a mining company desiring to put coal on the market. Some land is in the high- way used by streams of people. A Bucking- hamshire villas- i> no use to a Whiteley. Some land i> of oik- texture, other of another. The clays <>f tlie Thames Valley will not suit the requirements of Lincolnshire potato growers. Thus the differences in the quality of land and in its natural advantages determine where towns are to be, where different kinds of food are to be grown, where there are to be factories, where there are to be mines, where there are to he green fields, where there is to be a Black Country. This in turn determines that rents are to vary. Hut however much they vary, they are all of the same economic nature. They are the price paid to the landowner by the community — for it is really the community of consumers that pays and not the individual — to induce him to allow his land to be used at all. The owner of land is thus in the position of a man who holds the keys of life, and he consequently can exact a maximum toll as his 1 Wealth of Nations, chap. xi. FAILURE OF CAPITALISM 59 price. He does so. Rent therefore tends to absorb every social improvement that can be turned into an advantage in the exchange mar- ket. A marsh outside a town is drained, up go rents J a tram-line is laid into the outskirts of a town, up go rents; a mining-shaft is sunk and a specially profitable seam of coal is struck, up go rents; the industrial prosperity of a town improves, up go rents; the people of a town acquire the habit of shopping in certain streets, up go rents; peasant intensive cultivation is shown to be profitable in certain directions, up go rents; free education is granted, up go rents. The amount of rent is determined by the capacity of the community to buy, not by the value of the services rendered by the owners. It is a measure of monopoly. That a commu- nity which has improved its streets and edu- cated its people should allow the possessors of its land to secure for themselves the financial counterparts of these benefits can have no justification either in reason or in morality, whilst from the point of view of economy it is waste. Be it noted, however, that Socialism does not oppose rent, it only objects to rent belong- ing to private persons. These values are real. A shop in a frequented thoroughfare has a higher economic value than a shop in a back street; fine river loam has a higher agricultural value than sodden and heavy river clay; as the margin of cultivation widens the value of the old cultivated lands increases. Some one must benefit by economic rent. If it goes to 60 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT the fortunate shopkeeper, as the advocates of leasehold enfranchisement used to claim, he is receiving something which neither his labour nor his skill created; if it goes to the farmer on the long-cultivated fields, he is receiving a benefit which he has not earned. Its origin lies in the nature of things; even when it arises in consequence of the expenditure of capital on, say, a street improvement or on a tram- line, it is much more than interest on capital. When Moses struck the rock, the water that gushed forth and the streams which fol- lowed his people through the wilderness in consequence, being far more than the reward of his labour, could not justly be subject to the economic laws of private property. When a London Railway Company laid its lines through Buckingham and opened out wide fields upon which part of the population of London might spread itself, it put fortune after fortune into the pockets of landowners and speculators. That was not done by the expenditure of the Railway Company's capital, because the com- pany might have tunnelled Ben Nevis instead of the Finchley Hills and no new values would have been created. It was caused by the fact that there was a community ready to use the capital in the form of a railway and put itself in the power of the landowners who lay in wait for the exodus beyond Finchley and Harrow. The only just repository for such values is the communal exchequer. They are the natural source from which the cost of government and the development of communal action ought to be met. Every valid reason that can be urged FAILURE OF CAPITALISM 61 in favour of personal property can be used in favour of communal property. The community has created the values, and it needs them in order to continue a free existence. But to-day they are. handed over to private individuals who are parasitical sharers in national wealth. 2. Interest. Incomes derived from invested capital are not so easy to classify. The Ricardian dictum that all wealth is created by labour is not ex- actly true. It carries one much further than the statement which is true — that no wealth can be created without the service of labour. 1 1 A good deal of profitless attack upon socialist economic theory has taken place on this subject. The doctrine that all wealth is created by labour was laid down by Ricardo, though not by him in the first place. It was one of those abstractions which the liberal economists were fond of mak- ing for the purpose of simplifying their arguments. Marx took it from Ricardo, though not in the form generally supposed. Mr. Mallock, for instance, makes much of this, whipping it with the scorpions of his scorn. How the whip- ping is done may best be shown by parallel statements. Marx's theory as stated by himself. "By labour power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he ex- ercises when he produces a use value of any descrip- tion." Capital, I., p. 186. Mr. Mallock's rendering. Marx asserts that the measure of exchange be- tween one class of com- modities and another . . . is the amount of manual labour, estimated in terms of time, which is on an average necessary to the production of each of them. Critical Examination of So- cialism, p. 12. It is true that Marx believed that qualitative labour could be reduced for bis purposes to terms of quantitative labour, 62 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT But there is much wealth which labour cannot create without the aid of capital. A man can go into the forest and tear boughs off trees with his hands for his fires, but he cannot fell trees without an axe of some kind, which is capital. Capital, therefore, has its value, a simple fact which means that under the freest economic conditions, interest will be paid. It may be interest of five per cent., it may be of a tenth per cent., but the utility of capital in production will always have an appreciable value which the labourer who uses it will pay without suffering exploitation or injustice. In- terest is therefore not of the nature of a monop- oly toll. It is a payment for service rendered. This we may call pure interest. Risk may determine its amount, but no consideration but this can justify its existence. But everything called interest is not of this nature, as a study of some businesses will show. Money-lending has acquired an evil reputation because many of its transactions are of the nature of illicit operations. It lives under great risks; its victims are in unusual straits, and in relation to them it is almost of the nature of a monopoly because their chances of succour are so few; it deals with a class of reckless borrowers who are willing to sacrifice the whole of the morrow for a moment of pleasure to-day; it is often dishonest. When we allow it high interest to cover its risks, its income is still excessive and is exploitation. If we consider some of the recently formed but that is a totally different matter, and does not justify Mr. Mallock's misrepresentation. V FAILURE OF CAPITALISM 63 trusts we again discover incomes which cannot be justified on grounds of public interest. The capital of £34,000,000 which the Mercantile Marine Company carries is generally held to be too great. If interest were paid on it, the community would have to bear excessive freight rates; if interest is not paid on it somebody's money has been transferred into somebody else's pocket. The lending of such capital is not an assistance to but a hampering of enterprise. It is as much a waste of capital as was the old hoarding of money in a stocking, and it is far more detrimental to industry. Another source of capitalist incomes has been the forcing and keeping up of prices above economic levels. Thus the price of sugar in America has been kept up by the trust in spite of great improve- ments that ought to have reduced prices. The same is true of oil, and the whole world is groan- ing under the Meat Trust. The policy of Protection greatly enhances these incomes. They are all of the nature of exploitation. Similarly a substantial proportion of incomes made on Stock Exchange transactions has no justification. The Stock Exchange itself is a necessary institution and will continue to be so for a very long time to come. It is an organisation for the exchange of capital, a market for investments. But instead of being one of the organs of the industrial system, it is manipulated and controlled by financiers who influence prices and exchanges to suit their own interests. The manipulation of capital exchange has become a business which is para- sitic upon industry although the institution 64 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT through which the operations are carried on is necessary for industry. The rubber boom which took place in 1910 is a typical example of those activities. It resulted in no fewer than three injuries to trade. An important industry was unsettled by feverish speculation; it was burdened with unnecessary capital; the price of its products was forced up. Thus the incomes derived from these transactions more nearly represented a measure of industrial loss than of industrial service and gain. These are but examples, and they by no means exhaust the catalogue of anti-social sources of interest and successful business trans- actions which represent waste and exploitation. Such a catalogue would specify hundreds of ways of making an income, from dealing in slum leases to trading on bankruptcy stock, from shipping rings to sweating wages. 3. Waste of Capital. In addition to the specific instances of anti- social sources of income which I have given, I must comment on the general wasteful effect of the system as a whole. One of the chief characteristics of competitive commercialism is its chaos. It has no system at all. A B and C engage in competition with each other. Noth- ing but capacity of output or danger of bank- ruptcy limits and controls their activities. They pour upon the markets their goods; they manu- facture their stocks in expectation of orders which may or may not come. They take work- people from other employers and callings, and FAILURE OF CAPITALISM 65 may have to discharge them at the end of a week. Production is theoretically for the feed- ing and clothing of the people, but conducted as it is to-day by rivals who seek to stuff their victims and bury them under clothes, and who only stop" their mad follies when the markets are choked, and when a paralysed industry tells them in words that cannot be mistaken that they must stop, it results in industrial dis- order, uncertainty and poverty. Hence, it is true not only of over-capitalised trusts that production is bearing too heavy burdens, it is true of industry in general. There is far more capital in use than is necessary for efficient production, and for that competitive commercialism is to blame. An oft-used illus- tration of this is a comparison between the duplicating and overlapping milk-carts and bar- rows that are dragged up and down our streets of a morning, and the organised and non-com- petitive system of selling postage stamps. A well-organised milk trust run in the interests of the consumers would reduce the price of milk, diminish the amount of water in it, and improve its quality, not because it would elimi- nate the dishonest trader, but because it would effect substantial economies. We might pen- sion off every superfluous middleman and yet society would not be poorer but richer as the result. It is because this is true that trusts can economise even with a top-heavy burden of capital. It was stated when the American Wire Nail Association was formed in 1895, that the ma- chinery then working in the country could 66 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT produce four times the quantity of nails for which there was a demand. When the whisky combination was formed, also in America, it took over eighty plants and found it could produce up to the demand with twelve. The Sugar Trust was formed after eighteen of the forty refiners in the United States had become bankrupt. Eighteen of the survivors formed the Trust, eleven refineries were closed down, and the necessary production was carried on by seven. When combinations in our own country are formed, a similar process is gone through. Old work-places are closed, produc- tion is regulated and organised, profits are guaranteed when works are idle, economies in management are effected, processes of manu- facture are specialised, and differentiated The waste involved in competitive industry is enor- mous, and the sheer force of circumstances is tending to eliminate it. 4. Waste of Labour. One further consideration must be noted. We have seen that the private ownership of land and capital is a serious drain upon national wealth and a heavy burden upon national pro- duction. Let us now approach the subject from the standpoint of the waste of labour involved. A constant grievance against the amalgama- tion of railway interests which is going on to-day is its effect upon employees. 1 So long as pro- 1 The Pennsylvania Railroad boasted that in one year it had dispensed with 30,000 men owing to economies in FAILURE OF CAPITALISM 67 duction is carried on primarily for the profit of the owners of capital, ! ibour is not used to its economic maximum. There is no co- operation between capital and labour for the most economic use of both. Labour has to look after itself. Its more economic use — say by the introduction of machinery — may mean a lowering of the cost of production and conse- quently a fall in prices. But wage-earners can- not consider that, because the only immediate experience which they have of the change is that there is less demand for their services, that they are discharged, and that their incomes consequently cease altogether. The first task of a workman's life is to make a wage for this present week, and whatever prevents him from doing that cannot be welcomed by him, and we ought not to expect him to welcome it. This is why so many trade unions have at some time or another tried to limit production by adopting the policy of "ca' canny." x There is no justification in sound economics for this policy, but it can be excused as an incident in the attempts of capital to effect economies at the expense of labour. A much more prolific source of waste is the working, and in 1907 the New York Central dismissed ten per cent, of its main line staff for the same reason. The various proposals that have been made for the amalgama- tion of British railway interests have been resisted by the men, who are afraid of the staff reductions which follow, and they are being made the occasion for demands for shortening the working day. 1 It ought to be remembered that this policy is often advocated by capitalist organisations so as to keep up prices. 68 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT machinery employed by capitalists to secure custom for their giods. This is the cause of enormous expenditure in advertising and in putting an army of travellers on the road. When the British soap combine was formed, the Daily Mail objected to it on the ground that it would mean a loss to newspapers in advertising of £200,000, and on further inquiries the bead of an advertising firm put the loss "at nearer £500,000 than £200,000." The for- mation of the tobacco trust had a similar result. The hoardings showed that to the eye, and the ordinary newspaper reader, who but scanned advertisement columns, could not help missing familiar advertisements of tobacco manufac- turers' warts. Before the Standard Oil Com- pany secured its monopoly in the supply of paraffin in America, advertisements of oil stared one in the face everywhere, now they have disappeared. What has been aptly called "the standing army of commerce," the commercial travellers, is responsible for much larger expenditure. Mr. Bradley, who gave evidence before the United States Industrial Commission, referring to the cost of putting whisky on the market, said that forty million dollars were thus spent every year. The president of the Commercial Trav- ellers' National League stated that 35,000 sales- men had been thrown out of employment by the organisation of trusts, and that 25,000 others had to suffer reductions in salaries. He estimated that this reduction in the number of commercial travellers meant a loss to railways of £50 per day for 240 days in the year, or, FAILURE OF CAPITALISM 69 in all, £5,000,000; and that hotels were hit to about the same amount. This dislocation of labour has a justification in economy, but the fact that it has taken place shows what numbers of printers, bill-posters, papermakers, travellers, have to be maintained at the cost of general industry. For, it must be emphasised, few of these are producers in the strict sense of the word. The vast ma- jority of them are engaged in transferring cus- tom from one firm to another. They are tak- ing from Peter to give to Paul, without adding a halfpenny to the wealth of the community which consists of Peter and Paul. I must not be understood to argue that all advertisement or commercial travelling is waste. One of the functions of advertisement is to give informa- tion to consumers and users; one of the func- tions of travelling is to facilitate the exchange of goods between producer and distributor. These functions are necessary and are of the nature of real service which creates or adds to the facilities for using national wealth. Nor must I be assumed to argue that travellers are now unnecessary. They are part of the uneconomical use of labour occasioned by our present system. Under a better system they would be absorbed in other occupations. The fact is, that our present modes of pro- duction and distribution are complicated, expen- sive, burdensome and wasteful, to an extent which few have grasped because so much of the waste is hidden under the appearance of useful labour. One seeing a printer at work assumes without a second thought that the 70 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT man is a productive labourer. If, however, he is printing advertisements the only effect of which is to transfer custom from one firm to another, he is not a productive labourer at all. He is only getting a share of the wasteful ex- penditure of capitalist competition. No sane employer would employ two men to do one man's job, but our present system of production ami distribution employs an army of men who do not enter at all into the mechanism of real wealth production. Hence, our present system does not bear the test of economy. 5. Poverty. We can now apply the other test: Does our presenl system fulfil the ends of industry, namely, the keeping in decent comfort the people of the country? Again the answer must be in the negative. Under commercialism national wealth un- doubtedly increases. In 1812 Colquhoun esti- mated the wealth of the Inked Kingdom at L\\ 736,000,000; in 1855 Edleston estimated it at 1:5.760,000,000; in 1865 Giffen estimated it at £6,118,000,000; in 1875 at £8,548,000,000; in 1885 at 110,037,000,000; to-day it is esti- mated at £13,500,000,000. Similarly the in- come of the United Kingdom was estimated in 1840 to be £504,000,000; in 1860, £760,000,000; in 1889, £1,285,000,000; in 18bo, £1,421,000,000; in 1904, £1,700,000,000; to-day, £1,800,000,000. The wage-earners' share in 1850 was about £15 FAILURE OF CAPITALISM 71 per head per annum, in 1888 it had risen to £25, in 1905 to £29, and it remains about that to-day. Thus, the wage-earners' share has not increased in proportion to the increase of the national Income. I have already quoted Mr. Mallock's figures of family incomes, and these, read with the above figures and with the de- scriptions of poverty given in the investigations of Mr. Booth, Mr. Rowntree, the Social Union of Dundee, reveal a vast amount of poverty, a certain amount of which is punishment for personal errors, but the bulk of which is the product of our industrial system. Let us consider the most fruitful source of all poverty — unemployment. The unemployed man is not merely temporarily injured by idle- ness. He loses grip on life, his savings go, his membership of thrift clubs lapses, he acquires bad habits, his skill deteriorates, he becomes an "habitual." Even if he resists the worst effects of unemployment, he emerges from it with a heavy millstone of debt and discouragement about his neck, and if it recurs it may make it impossible for him ever to move from those shallows where he is stranded at every ebb of the industrial tide. Now, competitive industry always requires a margin of workless men. The tide is never steady, and the statistics show that at the very best of times from two to three per cent, of skilled men are out of work. That on a working population of 14,000,000 means that 280,000 workers are out of work during booms of trade. That figure rises four- fold and over in times of bad trade, and when we add dependents, we can gain some idea 72 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT of the disastrous effect of this single flaw in competitive industry. Now, it is not merely that our present sys- tem requires a constant margin of unemployed, it also requires B constant alternation of booms and depressions. It cannot work .steadily. It must always go by fits and starts. It is like a steam-engine without a regulator. The market is good and the demand is eager. Off goes every productive machine in the country. Everybody is piling his goods on to the market with a reckless disregard for the morrow. There is no attempt to gauge capacity oi con- sumption; there is do effort made to ascertain where the balance between supply and demand is fixed. The result is a choking <>f the market. depression in trade, unemployment, financial loss and bankruptcy. So incompetent is present- day society to handle stocks of commodities and distribute them that when nature happens to be in a generous mood and supplies rich harvests, distress as often follows as prosperity. In 1905 American newspapers announced that, owing to a big crop, cotton would have to be burned in the South to prevent serious loss to the growers. And so long as each producer works for himself alone, with his advertise- ments, his travellers, his agents, so long will there he chaos, unemployment, poverty. And to make matters worse on their dramatic side at any rate, all this unemployment takes place when wealth is most heaped up and wait- ing for consumers. When the shoemaker is shoeless on the street, capital is cheapest, leather is cheapest, and boots are filling the warehouses. FAILURE OF CAPITALISM 73 Conditions are all the worse on account of a circumstance upon which, on other grounds, we greatly pride ourselves. We are taught that we are free, that no one controls our goings- out and Our comings-in; and when Socialists speak of the present as a system of wage-slavery, we get angry. This freedom, however, has a fly in its amber. The man who is the property of another man is of value to that man and is not allowed by him to die of want or to become so degraded as to be useless. A man owning horses has far more cause for taking care Of them than he has for taking care of the men whom he employs to work the horses. If one man dies or becomes useless, there are always plenty to take his place. The perma- nent margin of unemployed provides what is wanted. This truth is well illustrated in the case of Pittsburg. The machines are valuable to the Steel Corporation; the "hands" are not. The machines are] kept in the best order. No money is spared to keep them up to date. The means of production are of the best. Turn to the people. The Russell Sage Fund Investi- gation has revealed a reckless and callous dis- regard for decency, for health, for comfort, for education in Pittsburg, which, were the details not supplied with scientific precision, one could hardly believe. The same thing is seen if we consider the effect of industrial legislation. When, for in- stance, the Workmen's Compensation Law was passed, employers who had hitherto felt little concern about the dangerous machines with 74 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT which their people had to work, began to inter- est themselves in guarding and fencing. Insur- ance companies began to impose conditions under whieli they were to do business. They appointed inspectors of their own to see that factories did not contain more points of acci- dent danger than were absolutely necessary, with the result thai this law, in addition to the compensation it provided for injured workers, made men of some value to their employers. Life insurance companies are beginning to appoint nurses to look after their ailing clients, and the mosl satisfactory consequence of sick- insuranoe in Germany is the elaborate system of preventive efforts bo which it has ii ri^e. A> disease and death become costly health and life beeorne Valuable. It also seems as though the forces which enabled labour to secure better conditions for itself are weakening. The industrial combina- tions of capital are rendering combinations of labour less effective, and even though legisla- tion i- beginning to do what trade unions did some years ago and bo impose certain standards of hours, conditions and, in certain trades, wages, recent defensive agreements between employers have gone far to restore the economic advantages which capital had when it was bargaining with unorganised labour. In the economic state of nature, there is no freedom of contact between capital and labour, the position of the two being so unequal. Labour combinations went a good way to establish some equality by their common bargaining and by their privileges to declare war and carry FAILURE OF CAPITALISM 75 it on. But capital can always restore the in- equality by following the lead of trade unions, and it is now doing so. The only reply that labour can make is to enter politics. When it did so*, however, it immediately met with the censure of the Law Courts, 1 and capital again got possession of its privileged position. But no responsibility is imposed on any one for causing a slump in trade. The alternation of overtime and unemployment is supposed to be as natural as that of night and day. The workers have to bear the burdens of the system under which they live, and as they are not responsible for its control, nothing is done by way of a remedy. 2 Thus the elironic under- payment of the workers adds to our chaotic methods of production in intensifying periods of apparent over-production and trade depres- sion. Nor is it much better with the class above the workers. As unemployment comes inevi- tably upon the wage-earners, so bankruptcy comes inevitably upon the capitalist. During the ten years preceding 1909, there were in 1 This refers to what is known as the Osborne judgment, by which the British Courts decided that it was outside the scope of the authorised purposes of Trade Unions to levy their members or spend their general funds to main- tain a political party. 2 Even here a beginning of new things has to be noted. The political organisation of labour brought this problem within the area of pressing political interests. The workers have to an extent become responsible for themselves, and consequently the Right to Work Hill has been discussed in parliament, and partly as a result of this a scheme of insurance against sickness and unemployment has been promised by the government. 76 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT England and Wales 78,000 bankruptcies and deeds of arrangement, with a total estimated loss to creditors of £81,000,000. In 1909 there were 7,561 bankruptcies and deeds of arrange- ment, and the total loss to creditors so far as the Board of Trade returns show them, amount I'd to no less a sum than £5,086,131. Although some enterprises that become bank- rupt are of the nature of experiments that would have had to be made under any system, and others an* purely fraudulent, the bulk of them are failures pure and simple, which must be put to the discredit of competitive commerce. Mr. David X. Wells, the American economist, published the result of an investigation made in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, 1 re- garding failures in business. "Of every hun- dred men in business in that place in 1845, ttty-five were out of business in five years, fifty in ten years, and sixty-seven in fifteen years; and most of these disappearances mean simply failui What man of practical in- stincts can regard such a state of things with a happy mind? In addition to actual failures, there is a struggle for life going on daily from which many competitors never get clear. They make ends meet only after the most continued strain. They keep their heads above water at the price of a physical and mental wear and tear which by and by bring disease in their train. The increase in insanity, in paralysis, in consump- tion, in ailments like diabetes and Bright's disease, which are supposed to have some con- 1 Recent Economic Changes, p. 351. FAILURE OF CAPITALISM 77 nection with mental worry, is one of the prob- lems with which modern medicine is struggling in vain. Thus our present system fails absolutely to satisfy the most primitive need of food, cloth- ing and shelter, for a large section; it imposes absolute failure on others struggling to meet that need, and it places such great difficulties in the way of others that they cannot enjoy life after these needs are satisfied; it makes the grip of the vast majority of men on a stand- ard of life which is but moderately comfortable, precarious in the extreme; it secures incomes to those who do no service and by allowing the growth of monopolies it tends to increase the power of those enjoying economic advan- tages and so it encourages exploitation. The present system bears neither of the two tests which were proposed for it at the begin- ning of this chapter. In a sentence, taking my last chapter with this, the Socialist charge against capitalism is that it is a method of exploitation, and in its development produces conditions which forbid and render impossible its continued existence. CHAPTER IV Till I MHIi r Vl'ITALIBM 1. Religion. Thf. n-volt apitalism and the domi- nance of property over men bis moved intel- lectual and artistic as well as economic senti- ments. Sir Thou as More wrote not as a victim, hut as a sensitive onlooker; the pioneeri of modern Socialism were as a rule men of sub- stance, troubled in spirit rather than in pocket. Thai there .should be such protests is no cause for wonder, for commercialism lias coarsened everything it has touched. It ifl frankly ma- terialist in its inspiration. Its gospd ifl the u irldly laws of acquiring, and it consequently must be in sharp conflict with every other gospel embodying the spiritual laws of being. A- f individualism and its results of poverty. It assailed competition as being of Satan, and urged that the best life <>f the community was hound up in co-operation. It had a firm belief in the organised community acting consciously ami guarding and promoting human well-being. Only in this way could nmral results be secured and virtue be made the gateway to reward. So it held that Social- ism was a product <»f Christianity. Co-operation on tin- largest ami most complete -'-air was the social mechanism through which alone Christianity could work. Ludlow. QUA of its founders and also one of the best <>f men, had been in France and had become enamoured of Proudhon. He returned to England full of the ideas of "mutualism," and consequently Chris- tian Socialism will always be associated with co-operative production and the self-governing workshop. The movement died after a short life extend- ing from is 18 to 1862, leaving as its progeny a hook or two like Kingsley's Alton Locke, a beautiful life or two of which that of Maurice was the most saintly, and the self-governing workshop which, after a generation of heart- breaking failure, is at last meeting with some success. It also left the trace of a tradition in the Church itself. Later on, when the social movement again INTELLECT UNDER CAPITALISM 81 gathered in importance and in socialistic con- sciousness, Christian Socialism revived round this tradition. The Guild of St. Matthew was founded in is;?, some of the leaden of the Free ChureheS, without forming any separate organisation, associated themselves openly with Socialism, and many of the younger ministers of all denominations ranged themselves behind the same banner. An association of Free < Ihurch Socialist clergymen was founded in 1905, and t Ik- Church Socialisl League in 1904. Now, the Church in all its sections is permeated with Socialism. The competitive system cannot be reconciled with Christianity. It is a struggle for the survival of those whose only virtue is that they are the most adaptable; religion can never abandon the desire to supplanl such a struggle by a method of selection which will secure the survival of graces and virtues. It must frequently result in glaring instances of the triumph of the unjust and «»f the otherwise unworthy; religion must always regard such results a< indication- that the conditions which produce them are alien to it. It is frankly a reign of wealth, whereas, though religion may approve of the authority of a gilded aristoc- racy—divine right— or of a sober democracy — divine equality — it never can justify to itself a sovereignty of money, an empire of plu- tocracy. Above all, religion must resent the attempts made by commercialism to measure virtues by their economic advantages and to appreciate — or depreciate — saints in accordance with whether they are or are not useful in 82 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT counting-houses. However strenuously the eco- nomic needs of churches and chapels may strive to proclaim peac<> between these two essentially antagonistic systems of ethics, the peace thus patched up musl always be unhappy and un- natural to both sides, and rebellion must fre- quently break out. As early Christianity had to challenge and change the life of Rome, so later Christianity must one day challenge and change the life of modern capitalist society. 2. Literature. This challenge has not only come from the religious sentiments, but from all activities of the intellect. The religious revival which pro- duced Christian Socialism was itself the result of a literary movement. The long reign of the formal and the classical when, as Taine said, men of letters adopted a style by which they held "as by their coats," was closed by the end of the eighteenth century, and nun wen beginning to return to nature for the refreshment of their souls and to history for the invigoration of their minds. This change in outlook and inspiration brought the poets into companionship with man as well as with nature, and the Cottar'* Saturday Night came to be written and Shelley's magnificent songs of democracy and liberty to be sung. Words- worth gave the simple dalesmen the mien of godlike dignity, and Coleridge bathed the whole of life in a glow of spiritual equality. The new literary movement divided. The main INTELLECT UNDER CAPITALISM 83 stream appeared to flow backwards to medie- valism and the ages of romance, and it refreshed the political system which grew up to contest supremacy with the growths of the Revolution; the other, "the waters of which were often min- gled with those of the first, hearing Carlyle, Elusion, Morris, Swinburne, flowed onward in a somewhat hesitating and twisting current, in the direction of Social Democracy. But neither Btream freshened commercialism. The industrial order was shunned by both. The cash nexus, the self-made rich man, the lack of good taste which the plutocracy showed, tin- biutalising of the lower classes, the destruction of the beautiful in nature, the enclosure of spots hal- lowed by beauty, the religion of utility — in a word, Manchesterism — have been attacked, lampooned and insulted (sometimes be it said, misrepresented, but that of itself is significant) by both the romantic and humanist schools of literature. There are men who live when' wealth is made. Thev hear the hum of the wheels all day: all day their eyes wander over stocks and ledger pages. It is difficult for them to use wealth. They may clothe themselves in all the appear- ances of richness, but the coverings fit badly on their backs, and no one can ever be deceived by their show. Now, when a new and rich wealth-producing epoch comes and gains pour in upon people in a great rush, this kind of rich man is produced. Political economy is written to explain and justify him; ethical systems are built up solely from his virtues; his success is canonised. But the praise is 84 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT only temporary. The world cannot continue to live and yet make obeisance to him. The minds who see past him and through him revolt against him. Hence every literary genius dur- ing the middle of the nineteenth century poured hot scorn or icy cold water upon the succe of his times. It is true these \\ r i t « • r ^ were gen- erally only unhappy critics or defiant rebels; tiny were not reconstructive; they only harped upon the desires of their imagination. Ruskin's vagueness has left us a number of illuminating aphorisms like: 'There i> no wealth hut life"; Caiiyle's passion has fashioned for us the medi- l-modern community of Past ami Present and thrown out volcanic eruptions of fault- finding; Dickens' pillorying'- led t»» the removal of some of tin- blotches in the face of society as he found it. but when he had described and had mingled his descriptions with the Bobbing protests of charity, he could do no more; Thackeray's gentlemen jrere dead or dying or had never been horn; Wagner was a Childe Harold; Victor Hugo amiahly and mournfully shook his head. But they stirred up enthusiasm and touched Numbering consciences into wake- fulness. They prevented "the man with the muck rake" having it all his own way. The world cannot exist without peace, leisure and beauty, and the whirring of wheels, the speeding of production, the depressing of vitality, the creation of ugly and shimmy towns, the transcendence of cash, darkened and blighted the realms of the imagination, as the smoking chimneys darkened and blighted the land- scapes. The arts fell to the lowest possible INTELLECT UNDER CAPITALISM 85 level. Domestic art in particular sank far down. The house itself and everything which it con- tained became a mere utilitarian shelter with- out a touch of beauty or idea. Things which used to express personality and give delight, were hustled out l>y machines, and craftsman- ship decayed. Whatever excep t ion can be taken to that statement is due to the fact that there were always coteries in revolt which though living in the period were not of it. When literature is used as an index of the mind of the people, one searches in vain e\eept on the very rarest of occasions for political demands or systematic criticism in tin- pages of novelists and poets. But one finds in these pages the spirit which is behind programmes. The great literary genius is seldom a man of the past, a mere classicist, a bookman. He gathers up in himself the spirit of his time. Of events and of the clashing of parties going on around him he may know nothing, but of the impelling underlying forces, the tides of fundamental feel- ings that arc sweeping his time along, he knows more than most men. Therefore, if the list of actual Socialists amongst the literary and artis- tic geniuses who have lived during the commer- cialist epoch is small though by no means insignificant, that shows little one way or an- other. The artistic protest against commer- cialism can be traced in a well-defined current of critical idealism most ample in its propor- tions right through last century. What is but vague and critical in the protest has in due time become definite and constructive under the moulding fingers of Socialism. For instance, 86 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT the influence of both Carlyle and Ruskin has been a powerful tendency in the direction of Socialism although neither of them could be said to show much appreciation of the most essentia] foundations- e.g. democracy — of the fabric <>f the socialist system. The evolution of William Morris followed the path of that of many a humble man. He was the child of Elusion and Carlyle. But he did not use his love of the romantic and of the beautiful only BS ;i cudgel by which to beat the back of his time, or ;i- an inspiration for the coinage of phrases of literary ami ethical beauty. It led him to Socialism. Be saw that tin- drudgery of the machine-minder and the factory hand must crush out the joy in life which is the mother of art. Or, as he said himself: "Slavery lies between us and art." Hut Morris was the exception. The socialistic spirit transfuses the work of the artist as a rule; the artist dott not appear as a propagandist, a lecturer, a chairman of meetings. That work is done by other types of mind. Remembering this, we turn to the writers of the last century and find that our Socialism freely tinges their work. The wells of refresh- ment of which they drank an- those which we frequent. Wordsworth's magnificent s ( ,nnet which stands up like the doleful D e of an [sraelitish prophet: 'The world is too much with us," is the vision which the Socialist sees and seeks to guard against. From an opposite direction altogether Dickens approaches to fulfil the same mission. lie was more of the dema- gogue and less of the poet. He was class con- INTELLECT UNDER CAPITALISM 87 scious and never drew the portrait of an aristo- crat without a flaw. He had do system but chaustible reservoirs <»f feeling, and that feeling in its quality was the same as inspired Burns to write <»f "von birkie ca'd a lord" and "a man's a man for a' that." These may be but evidences of political prejudice. Well, it is the political prejudice which in time, and after being hammered into .shape and tempered oo the anvil of reason, becomes Socialism. Through the work of both the poet and the novelist ran the broad and deep tendency towards democracy, towards social equality and economic justice — that is, towards Socialist change. In short, the poets and writers of the century that is past, in the main contemned their own age. They did HOt ennoble it for they were not of it. They laughed at what it cherished. They were Utopians and reformers in relation to it. Meredith and Hardy, Tolstoy and Ibsen, Turgenev and Anatole Prance; Burne Jones and Watts, the Pre-Raphaelites and the founders of the schools of arts and crafts — all pointed a way out of the weary dulness, the brutalising strife and the hardening materialism of com- mercialism, or were in revolt against a state which Matthew Arnold said, "materialises our upper class, vulgarises our middle class, bru- talises our lower class." Romanticism, culture, humanism, all declined to accept the compan- ionship of commercialism, and if they at the same time declined to label themselves Social- ist, they worshipped with Socialists, drank from the same sparkling springs of energy, and scanned ss I IN BOCIALIST MOVEMENT the horizon with expectant hopes for the hum dawn. Moreover, those who were inspired by them brought down from the empyrean into the fogs and dust of the day, their thoughts and prophecies, t ln-ir criticiams and their dreama; and Socialism was the result. The common mind sn\s the ways and means OVCT the tops of which genius gases heavenwards and con- sequently neither sees nor troubles about them. e of the beat literary and artistic wort the last century hai been but as drum I to which the step o! Socialism kept time. 3. 90. On its scientific ride, this movement hai been equally well marked, though in this country, unfortunately men have not I distinguished since Faraday's time for that democratic humility which is the orown of intellectuality. Science in ( treat Britain lias run after social honours and even its Liberalism yed. We have not, therefore, in this country that circle of the intellectual democracy which has enriched liberal thought on th< < tinent. Curie and Lombroc - cialists, and we can claim the most distinguished of all our living scientists, Alfred Mussel Wallace. A brilliant, if small* body of scientific men k> him company. Imt uiin a m- 'alogue of names is meanii The reason why Socialism and the scientific mind should be congenial to each other is far to seek. The scientist loves order and is INTELLECT UNDER CAPITALISM 89 repelled by disorder. He same intellectual promptings which lead him to invent a water tap which will nut . will make him take an intere-t in proposals t<> <|<> away with the indlis- trial wastage <>f unemployment. For his schools, fur his laboratories, fur hi- research work, he ha- generally to turn to the state. II<- knows by hitter experience, particularly if his field i- that ^i any of the human ami tocia] iciences, that privately en. lowed teaching places are nut free; 1 if In- deals with the physiological group of sciences, he knows the havoc which competitive industry makes with nerves and bodily health, with hygiene ami physique. Hut, ■bove all. the man who live-, in an intellectual atmosphere and with an intellectual corupan- ionship musl be repelled by the qualities which can amass property to-day and which, in conse- quence, give tune to society. An intellectual aristocracy must be in revolt against a commer- cial plutocracy. M p, as I -hall point <>ut in a later chap- S " iali-t method i» the scientific method. It i- the method <»f evolution applied to society. It a--ume- that society i- fulfilling it- pa-t in evolving the mure efficient form- of the future; from certain well-observed tendencies and fea- ture- it constructs working hypot he ses, and it uses these hypotheses a- guides fur experiments which by condemning or justifying them open 1 President Hadley >>f Yd ipoanble for the .>.' nn-nt that "a I "n i \ i-r-it y i- moR 1 ik- ! ;. to obtain ni<>n<'y if it rivet the prope rty ownen reason to be li eve that v richts will not be interfered with." (Quoted in Spargo's Common Ssbm of Socialism, p. 65.) 90 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT the way for further and still more comprehen- sive hypotheses. Thus the whole of society, its organisation, its institutions, its activities, i- brought within tin- sway of natural law, not merely on it- descriptive and historical side bul <>n its experimental side, ami administra- tion ami legislation become arts pursued in thr same way as tin- chemist works in his labora- tory. Socialism alone is worthy uow-a-daya of tin- title of scientific politics. Hut society as the subject matter for scientific study ami treatment has hardly more than crossed the threshold of the laboratory. Sir Francis Galton's imperfect application of theo- ries of heredity to government is still the best contribution made by science to the subject. Public health, family needs, school hygiene, the whole field of Eugenics in its widest ami most proper SCOpe, is afl Sparsely tenanted by scien- tific investigators as central Australia is by agriculturists. Hut an emigration of interest has commenced and the evidence is BO clear that one is tempted to prophesy that the sci- ence which is to add laurels to the twentieth century, as biology gave laurels to the nine- teenth, is the science of sociology, including social heredity, social health, and social organi- sation; and in that science Socialist theory and programmes must find a central place. Socialism has made sociology important. Thus our Socialism has its roots dug deep in literature, art, science, religion — in all the creative activities of the intellect. Sometimes these express themselves only as a revolt, some- times as yearnings after the phantastical, some- INTELLECT UNDER CAPITALISM 91 times they wander back to the religious brother- hoods that once were but which went out with the conditions which made them possible, some- times they- content themselves with singing of the ideal. But when the passions ar ' longing they awaken, the principles and n. . es they proclaim, the rules and methods they demand, are all gathered together and systematized as a guide for practical politio and an impulse for immediate activity, it is Socialism which they create and encourage as their economic environment— Soeialism, the revolt against in- dividualist commercialism, the hypothesis from which the future organisation of society is to be built up, the ideal city to which the feet of men seeking a rational life and a moral commu- nity must always wander. 4. Comfort. Nor is this intellectual appeal confined to what are called the intellectual classes. Marx, taking an all too narrow stand on the economic determinism of history, was compelled to lay down the law of increasing misery as thc^ law of Socialism. The rich were to get richer and the poor poorer. Wealth was to gather in the hands of a very few and misery was to become general. Then the change was to come. There is far more in the Marxian forecast than appears in the experience of the last two or three genera- tions. It was unfortunate in its moment of publication. The eighteenth and early nine- teenth century writers who also believed in it, 92 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT were justified by events far more than Marx. For the workers were then going down into very shadowy paths. But in Marx's time a vast expansion of commerce was imminent. Never 1 i I commerce leaped forward with such bounds .. it did in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the working classes shared in the genera] increase in wealth. Engels described the black cloud which overhung the working classes just at the moment when some rays of light were penetrating it. Marx said that Socialism would come because misery would increase; aa a matter of fact Socialism spread whilst misery was being lightened. Therefore a reply to UM Marxian dogma is not a reply to Socialism. There are two possible avenues down which Socialism may come. It may come from the darkness of misery, its way lit by tlaming torches; or it may come from the advancing dawn of prosperity, its way lit by the steady broadening of the day. For the past generation or so, it has come by the latter way. We are better clothed than our grandfathers, we are better housed than thev, we have a wider choice for consumption than they had. What then? Sat- isfaction? Or more hungering and thirsting? Certainly more hungering ami thirsting. It is interesting as a matter of personal experience to note that the strength of Socialism is not found in the shimmy and most miserable quar- ters in towns, but in those quarters upon which the sun of prosperity manages to shine. It is the skilled artisan, the trade unionist, the mem- ber of the friendly society, the young workman INTELLECT UNDER CAPITALISM 93 who reads and thinks, who are the recruits to the army of Socialism. The explanation is not difficult to discover. In dealing with horses we are dealing with stomachs only; in dealing with men,. we are dealing with stomachs and heads. The needs of a horse present a purely quantitative problem in the supply of hay, the needs of a man present a qualitative one in the supply of intellectual happiness. Man is not satisfied with a little. Everything he acquires broadens his horizon and reveals in a widen- ing sweep the hitherto unattained. Socialism is therefore not a fleeing from the wrath which is to come, but a stretching out towards a state where more of the blessings now enjoyed are to be the lot of men. Its driving force is intellectual as w T ell as economic. The spread of education, the sharpening of a sense of self-respect, the awakening of imagi- nation, the increase of comfort amongst the workers, enhance the attractiveness of the Social- ist appeal and prepare the soil for the Socialist seed. Give us more religion of the true kind, more literary and artistic culture, more science, and the opportunities of Socialism are thereby increased. CHAPTER V SUMMARY We are now in n position to summarise the criticism which Socialism passes on the existing order of thin Commercialism U a phase in the evolution of industrial organisation, and is not its final form. It arose when nations were sufficiently established to make national and international markcN possible, and it created classes and interests which separated themselves from the rest of the community and which proceeded to buttress themselves behind economic monopo- lies, soda! privileges, political power. The new industrial regime supplanted feudalism when the historical work of feudalism was done and it had (eased to he useful, and proeeinied to build up a method of wealth production and distribution regulated by nothing hut the desire for individual success and private gain. The new power lost sight of social responsibilities and social coherence. The interests of the individualist capitalist, of the class of capital- ists, of the property owners, were put first, and those of the community as a whole were subor- dinated. It was hoped, but for no well-con- sidered reason, that by the individual capitalist 94 V SUMMARY 95 pursuing his own interest national well-being would be served. The error soon reaped its harvest of misery, when women and children were dragged into the factories late in the eight- eenth and, early in the nineteenth centuries, when people were gathered into foul industrial towns, and when only human endurance limited the length of the working day. So separate had become the interests of the nation from those of the propertied classes that the latter found profit from the degradation and deterioration of the population. It mattered not to the cotton owner of Lancashire a hundred years ago what became of the children who were working in his factories, or later on, what be- came of the women who took their places. When one "hand" died another "hand" was ready to step into his place, and whether his life was long or short, sad or merry, the ma- chines which he tended spun out their enor- mous profits, and the owner saw no reason to believe that the da}* of his prosperity was short. The system certainly solved the problem of production. Under its whips and in search of its prizes, mechanical invention proceeded apace, labour was organised and its efficiency multi- plied ten, twenty, an hundred fold. Statistics in proof of this live with the wonder that is in them. That twentv men in Lancashire to-dav can make as much cotton a> the whole of the old cotton-producing Lancashire put together; that 1,000 shoe operatives in Leicester can supply a quarter of a million people with four pairs of boots a year; that l w 20 men in a mill 9G THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT can grind enough flour to keep 200,000 people's wants fully supplied, seem to come from the pages of romance rather than from the sober history of industry. Commercialism has writ- ten those pages, and tiny are its permanent contribution to human well-being. As time went on, however, it was seen that this wonderful system of production was quite unable to devise any mechanism of distribu- tion which could relate rewards to deserts. Distribution was l<-ft to the .stress and uncer- tainty of competition and the struggle of eco- nomic advantages. The law of the survival of tin; fittot was allowed t<> have absolute sway, under circumstances which deprived it of moral value. The result was that national wealth was heaped up at one end o\er a com- paratively small number of people and lay thinned out at the other end over great ma of the population. At one end people had too much and could not spend it profitably, at tin- other end they had too little and never gained that mastery of things which is prelimi- nary to well-ordered life. Moreover, even many of those who possessed held their property on such precarious tenure that possession gave them little security and peace of mind. Pros- perity was intermittent both for capital and labour. Then conscious effort to rectify the chaos began to show itself. The national will pro- tected the national interests through factory and labour legislation, and at the same time the chaos within the system was being modified by the life of the system itself. Competition SUMMARY 97 worked itself out in certain directions, and co- operation in the form of trusts came to take its place, as nature turns to hide up the traces of war in a country that has been fought over. This new organisation is more economical and may steidy to some extent the demand for labour; but it means that economic power is being placed in the hands of a few. That is too dangerous in the eyes of the Socialist. Its operation is too uncertain. Prom his very nature the monopolist is an exploiter. 1 He grasps the sceptre of state, as well as the sceptre of industry. He sits in Parliament as well as in the counting-house. He becomes a powerful citizen as well as a masterful captain of indus- try, lie raises in a most acute form the problem of how the community can protect itself against interests being created round its exploitation and enslavement. Competition solves its own problems and leaves those of monopoly in their place. Surveying the same field with an eve on the moral fruits which it has borne, the Socialist once more discovers weeds in plenty. The familiar methods of adulteration and of all forms of sharp dealing, both with work-people and with customers, pass before his eyes in disquieting masses. Honesty on this field is not the best policy. Materialist motives pre- dominate. Birth and honour bow to wealth. 1 Here and elsewhere in this book the word "exploit" is used to indicate the taking for oneself something to which one is not justly entitled, and must not be read in the colourless sense of turning latent resources to good account. 98 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT Wealth can do anything in "good" society to-day — even to the purchase of wives as in a slave market. A person may be vulgar, may be uncultured, may be coarse and altogether unpleasing in mind and manner but, if he has money, the doors of honour are thrown open to him, the places of honour are reserved for his occupation. The struggle for life carried on under the conditions of commercialism means the survival of sharp wits and acquisitive quali- ty -^. The pushful energy which brings ledger successes survives as the "fittest" under com- mercialism. Capitalism has created a rough and ill-working mechanism of industry and a low standard of value based upon nothing but industrial considerations and it has done its best to hand over both public and private values to be measured by this standard and to be produced by this mechanism. But the controlling influences which have been brought to bear upon it — both those of a political character from without and those of an industrial character from within — are the foreshadowinga of a new system of organisa- tion. Commercialism lays its own cuckoo egg in its nest. Every epoch produces the thought and the ideals which end itself. Like a dis- solving view on a screen, commercialism fades away and the image of Socialism comes out in clearer outline. * CHAPTER VI SOCIALIST METHOD Hitherto I have been detailing the Socialist criticism of the existing order, and I must now turn my attention to the constructive side of the movement. As a preliminary it is neces- sary to understand what the Socialist method is. 1. Utopian ism. The Socialist movement, as conceived by the pre-Marxian Socialist, was not an incident in a social evolution in which the whole of society was to play a part; reason and moral affection were to bring the change as an act of individual will. Thus Fourier, Robert Owen and others had no idea of effecting a great Socialist trans- formation by organic change brought about, in the first instance at any rate, by political action, but they spent their energies in attempting to found ideal communities wherein righteousness was to dwell, and from which enlightenment was to beam all over the world. By the suc- cess of these communities, kings and rulers and the misery-haunted common folk were to be 99 100 Till: SOCIALIST MOVEMENT converted to the New Harmony, and the na- tions were to give up their old ways and pursue the better path. These were the days before the historical spirit had been awakened into life by the idea of evolution. Man was assumed to l'<- a fixed entity <>f de-ires and modes <'f action, and not an organism subject to hi-tori- cal change. Tin- Utopian method was, there- fore, not organic pi hut mechanical reno- vation. The <-arly socialists hardly grasped tin* fad that society and its various forms of organi- sation had historical ro<>t>; that -ocial hahits and relationships could n<'t be thrown off like an old garment when fashio] . hut that they constituted a systematic whole, balai in its relationship, intricate in its hHerdepend- ence, and linked by vital bonds to the past. \\ <• call this phase of tin- Socialist movement the utopian phase, meaning by that tin- pre- Bcientific phase, when Socialism added to a perfectly sound criticism of the present and a pretty dear insight into the future, methods of reconstruction which were inadequate and unsuitable to society, go if y,,u l'o to-day to plac.-> like Heronsville, near tic London suburb of Chorley Wood, yon will find no trace of the < M onnellsville settlement which was the origin of the village, and which was meant to he the origin of a new world. It his been lost sj_r|,t of. and the people who live there now have never even heard its name. All the other similar experiments have died too, not because, as their hostile critics arc- 90 fond of assuring us. human nature could not stand them, but because their sociological method was wrong. SOCIALIST METHOD 101 There is another difference between the two phases of the Socialist movement, which is an asped of tin' one I have been explaining. The old, with the exception of Saint-Simonianiam, saw social regeneration coming through the commune, the new sees it coming through the state. In this respect, all the error is not with the old. We shall have no Fourier Phalan- steries, hut no Socialist movement can now exist without a programme «»f municipalisation. The state is not only the government at White- hall. It is the city, the town, the village, the family as well. That part of Utopian Socialism i-> being refitted into the modern movement. The weakness <>f the Utopian method became Very evident to a generation engaged in politi- cal conflict. Both France and Germany had to deal with unpopular governments, and Eng- land had to go through the long Reform agi- tation so that democracy might take the place of Family rule. Only America, with its wide unsettled plain-, it- slack soda! organisation and untrammelled freedom, was in a position to olTer even a temporary success to utopianism. The political movement in Europe impinj I upon the Socialist movement, changed it •> char- acter, hardened its will, and, for the time !>einL. f . narrowed its vision. What was to have been a movement joined by all flinnrn of society led by sweet reason and austere justice, became an agitation of the suffering proletariat ' class, 1 This clumsy word lias no euphonious equivalent in Eng- lish. It indicates the dan without land or reserve of capital of any kind — the wage-earner pure and simple. 10* THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT conscious of its wrongs and clamant for its rights, determined t<> exercise its power. The Utopian method of example and of a spick- and-span order in a dolls bouse Phalanstery or ,i wen Harmony \^;i> set aside, and the method of capturing the political power of the state was inaugurated. Some Socialists have mourned thai I Ik- idealism of the Utopian stage WSJ trampled down l»y the new leadership. They do right in regretting it. bul it was inevitable. ialism," as Louis Blanc said, n be fructified only by the breath of politics" — "proletarian politii Marx added. This i- known as the scientific phase of the Socialist movement. Like all revulsions against old conceptions, it start- at a point too far away from the old error to l.e itself an expression of the real truth, for in all such circumstances wisdom consists in the combination of two extreme positions, which when held separately arc two mistal Hut the political method, in s.. far as it i.. nises that society can never change its relation- ship- except in an organic and all round way, i- true to the facts; in s ( > far as it is a recog- nition that the social will which direct- change within society must operate through the politi- cal state, it i> again true to th<- facts; and finally, in so far as it recognises that no social altera- tion can he permanent unless it is begun l>y a change in the general public outlook on politi- cal and social rights, it is again true to the facts. Further, in bo far as scientific Socialism in by uniting the working rltinorn in a politi- cal movement and in centring that movement SOCIALIST METHOD 103 round certain abstractions in political and economic theory, it only followed the method tli.it every other movement has ever followed or can eyer follow. Thus Socialism towards thf middle of the nineteenth century became' a political movement. Its growth since then has been the growth of a political movement, and what prospects it haa at the present momenl of BUCCeedmg are due to the fact that it is a political movement. 2. Revolution. Thus it will he seen that the talk of revolu- tion as a Socialist method is wrong. Revolu- tion can never bring Socialism, because the change which Socialists contemplate is one which will affed every fibre of society, and which must therefore be an organic process. Changes in the superficial things of govern- ment, for instance whether there is to be a republic or a monarchy, or whether the people are to be allowed political power or to be kept in political slavery, may be effected by an appeal to the sword, but a change which is to readjust the processes of wealth production and of na- tional and international exchange, which is to establish some system of justice in settling the relations between services and reward, and which is to end the economic organisation which pro- duces too much wealth on the one side and too much poverty on the other, is- not the kind of change to which revolutions can contribute anything. It is to be regretted that, in order 104 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT to keep up an honoured hut antiquated phr. ology, some Socialists still use the word revo- lution to indicate what they have in mind. It must be observed, therefore, that they use the word in a very special way. They simply mean to indicate by it, that when Socialism has come the change will he so great as to be fundamental, and that the state of society which th"ii will have heen evolved will he so different from that from which the evolution sprung, that it will not he the same kind of society at all. That being BO, those Socialists consider that they arc justified in speaking of olutionary Socialism." They only add to the difficulties of those who arc trying to under- stand them. Revolution does not mean a hig change, hut a sudden and violent change. Even the expression "the Industrial Revolution" always conveys the idea that the change i effected rapidly, and that it disorganised for the time being the existing order. It must therefore be understood that when Socialists use the term '"Social Revolution," in connection with Socialism, they wish to indicate the com- pleteness of the change which they contem- plate, not the methods by which they propose to bring about the change. Revolution is the end, not the means to the end. 1 'This is illustrated by an incident in the life of Marx. In 1850, he resigned from the executive of the Communist League on the ground that his fellow-members were substituting "revolutionary phrasea for revolutionary evolution." SOCIALIST METHOD 105 3. The Experimental Method. Every state has the capacity through legisla- tion and administration to fix in society certain social relationships and habits which have been proved by experiment to be good for the com- munity and which are approved by the greater part of the public. This fact determines the modern Socialist method. When the state is democratically governed and laws are made and applied under the guidance of common experi- ence, the part played by legislation and admin- istration becomes more and more important. When a class is in power which, owing to its economic resources, can protect itself, the legis- lature will not do much work. It may be an enticing debating place, but its volume of legis- lation will be small. Indeed, the state of the dominant political mind at such a time is such that the generally accepted theory of govern- ment is that the state should be as passive as able, doing little beyond military and police service, and that its relation to the citizens is best expressed in the antithesis: the man versus the state. But when enfranchisement reaches the stratum where the common man is found; the legisla- ture meets with a new influence altogether. The elector, the creator of parliamentary ma- jorities, is now a man who is not in an eco- nomic position to protect himself. Indeed, he is the victim of his economic weakness, and he has to depend on his political power to adjust the balance in his favour. The state becomes 106 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT his ally not his rival. An opposition between the man and the state is not present to the minds of the majority. Libert}' to the possess- ing classes is a right to use property, to the labouring classes it is a right to be protected against the abuse <>f property; as an absolute ideal to the possessing classes, it is the drawing up of every stake thai limits action except the action of property-holders, as an absolute ideal to the labouring classes, it is the limitation of the exercise <»f certain powers of action for the purpose of securing the greatest protection and freedom for the greatest number. This is the fundamental change in the politi- cal intelligence which comes with the enfran- chisement of the common folk, and which makes democracy something more than "a form of government." The relation between the state and the individual is revolutionised. For when men think of the state as an authority which says "Let us do this together," instead of one which Bays— "You must not do this" the whole standpoint from which they survey the future is changed. Progress becomes a matter of mutual aid, instead of the result of the struggle lor life. Education, culture, morality, idealism — and not economic power — become the creative forces in society, and the social mind is bent upon producing a congenial social environment through which these can work. In other words, the spirit of constructive Socialism arises from political democracy. With the approach of the sun to the earth in spring, the breeze warms and the wayside bursts out into colour. Life is the companion of the hours * SOCIALIST METHOD 107 of spring. So is Socialism the companion of democracy. The people become accustomed to Socialist axioms. Even when they imagine they are shunning Socialism they are following it. It is said 'of a certain Indian state that it has a make-believe parliament. Men meet together and discuss and pass resolutions and the Rajah proceeds forthwith to tear them up and throw them to the winds. And when one was asked why he continued to sit in such a parliament, he smiled and said that their resolutions were first of all torn up but in a short time they were acted upon by the Rajah, because even he was but a spill floating on the currents of public opinion. Thus the Socialist spirit and point of view may be the subject of violent hostile propaganda, but all parties in the state have to accept its guidance and form their legisla- tion accordingly. Whether, in a coming tin.'-, the drift of the current is to change its direction or not, is a matter of speculation, which only idle men will spend much time in discussing. To-day, it is running clear and strong, not because men believe in Socialism but because Socialism is a consequence of democracy. 4. The Parliamentary Method. The political policy of Socialism presents many difficult problems which are not the same in any two countries, and which are more complicated in Great Britain than in any other land of the globe. A comparison between German political con- 108 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT ditions and our own will enable me to make this clear. The German Reichstag is not a parliament. When Bismarck drafted the con- stitution, which with but few amendments was accepted for the German Empire, he had two leading purposes in his mind. He determined to create a legislature based on the most demo- cratic Franchise, but devoid of every particle of real power, and at the same time to repose the real legislative and executive authority of the confederation in a Bundesrath which was to be so constituted as to be a fortress of the □ extreme kind of conservatism. The Reichstag is therefore little more than a del ating society, wherein, however, serious affairs of state are discussed and public opinion expressed in such a way that the responsible authorities cannot afford to overlook it. It has been d< scribed as the weakest lower house of parliament in the world, whilst the Bundesrath has been described a^ the strongest upper house. If there were to be a redistribution of seats and the towns were adequately re p res en ted, the flood of Radi- cal and Socialist repre sen tation that would fol- low would swamp the Bismarck constitution. But I am not dealing with the future, I am dealing with what is. The parties constituting an assembly of debate which is not an assem- bly of authority must be subject to a very dif- ferent set of influences from that which plays upon our British political parties. A Chamber responsible to public opinion for its acts and free constitutionally to make its will effective, must keep in touch with every phase of the public mind and must make itself responsible SOCIALIST METHOD 109 for every step in national evolution. The par- ties in such a Chamber have to pay far more attention to method and immediate programmes than to abstract principles, though they must find principles necessary as the mould in which to fashion programmes, and as the lamps by which to guide their steps. They will be far less able to take purely negative attitudes, and they will have far fewer opportunities to vote on separate measures without reference to the complete work of sessions and to the govern- ments that are in power. The consequences of their action upon the general political situation, the relation which every question bears to the larger programmes and to the advantage or disadvantage of other parties must be ever in their minds. In other words, whilst the eyes of the parties in an irresponsible legislature like the Reichstag are fixed upon the horizon, those of the parties in a responsible legislature like our own House of Commons are fixed at their feet. To-day and to-morrow are of rela- tively small consequence under the former con- ditions; they are of the greatest importance under the latter conditions. Under the former conditions hard and fast lines can be drawn between parties; under the latter there are transition groups which blur the great divisions. Hence, when Socialism as a movement arises in a state which is governed autocratically like Germany, it does not influence legislation from day to day. It frightens rulers and in that way gets certain things done, as Bismarck was compelled to pass Socialistic legislation in his attempt to cut off at its source the discontent 110 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT from which the Socialist movement was re- cruited. But that is a different thing from influencing the creative opinion of a nation and making that opinion more and mere sym- pathetic and more and more friendly in all its actions. Under a democracy every Socialist advance tinges with red the opinions of the other parties. They compete with it for votes, and consequently if it succeeds in changing opinion it also changes parties. A dogmatic Liberal <>r Conservative party finding a habi- tation in the ancient creeds of individualism or of aristocratic privilege, is just as impossible under British conditions a- is a similar Social- ist party dwelling in a fairyland of economic justice. The practical results of the Socialist agitation in Germany and Great Britain may l>e the same, but the methods are quite dif- ferent. 1 These differences do not depend upon some fixed differences in national characteristics, but upon political systems, and consequently the granting of real democratic liberty to the Ger- man parliament would bring the German So- eialists face to face with exactly the same problems in political policy as the British Socialists have now to meet. The method of Socialism under democracy can never be cata- 1 Although the difference I am pointing out is real, it must not be exaggerated. Fur instance, the German Social Democrats, as well as ourselves, discriminate between par- ties, and at the x-cond ballots, when they have no candi- date of their own surviving, they do not, as a rule, abstain from voting, but support the party which comes nearest to themselves. In the Prussian State Elections they have even made official overtures to the Liberals. SOCIALIST METHOD 111 clysinic, because changed opinions and outlooks will have a steady and uninterrupted influence on administration and legislation. What can- not be done at a ballot box in a democracy cannot be^ done at a barricade. Like cordite burning in the open, old conditions will be harmlessly transformed; they will not, like cordite burning in a confined place, become explosive. Social organisation will be changed here and there just as the makers of a fabric of elaborate pattern complete its design by adding this and that patch of colour in obedi- ence to the complete artistic idea they are working out. Or perhap - an even better anal- ogy for the change is that which takes place in an organism which is moving from one set of vital conditions to another. Its muscles, its digestive organs, its temperament alter in obedience to the subtile change of environment which is going on around it. Every objection to Socialism based on the contention that no one can foresee all the de- tails of the change which it involves and that, in consequence, there will be chaos the morrow after the first Socialist sun sets; that no one has produced a scheme for securing a supply of bottlewashers, navvies, newspaper editors, poets, and that therefore Socialism will break down for lack of variety in social functionaries — all these objections fail because they do not touch reality. The Socialist method avoids such disasters. The approach to Socialism is by the Parliamentary method. Step by step we shall go experiencing every incident on the way and deciding stage by stage where the 112 THE SOCLVLIST MOVEMENT next day's journey leads, and whether the in- ducements and expectations point our way. The problems will be solved as they arise. The characteristics of the method can best be understood by an examination of one of the conundrums put to us regarding the work- ing of some of the details of the perfect Social- ist state. The criticism proceeds in this way: Your Socialism assumes this and that (very often, be it noted, it does nothing of the kind), but men will inner tolerate such a this and that, therefore your Socialism is impossible. Lei n> take as an example the question as to whether under Socialism there will be equal pay for all work. As a question of practical importance, nothing is more certain than that a Socialist state can yield a vast amount of benefit to its citizens whilst unequal incomes .ire paid to .sen ice givers. Hut there are some Socialist critics who insist noon imparting to Socialism a moral symmetry which, undoubtedlv, could it he maintained in working, would have valuable social results of an idealistic kind. How does the Socialist approach the question? He may admit that generally speaking the effort of, say. a first-class surgeon is not any more than that of an eflicient navvy, though the skill of the former is far rarer than that of the latter, and is therefore rewarded to some extent as a landowner who can exact rent is rewarded. 1 He may further admit that it is quite conceivable that the attractions of the 1 The wages of ability are partly of the nature of rent, because they are the share claimed by a holder of a mon- opoly. SOCIALIST METHOD 113 former calling are so great to certain types of mind, that they will be content to consider the mere opportunities to exercise their skill as themselves a precious reward, just as a healthy athlete requires no fee or prize-money to induce Turn to go a long walk. But if he is wise, he will content himself, so far as dogma- tising about Socialism is concerned, with the contention that this question cannot be settled now, and therefore cannot be discussed profit- ably except as a speculative exercise. We cannot measure the motives which will be in full play in the Socialist era. We know that to-day the desire to accumulate wealth is pre- dominant in most professions; on the other hand, we also know that there are in every profession men who give service without a thought of how much it will bring into their pockets. Again, we know that under com- mercialism material reward is regarded as the only tangible reward, that its amplitude is the public sign of success, and that men are taught to pursue it primarily. Further, we know that as the standard of ability is raised all round, the rent of ability will fall, just as the rent of land falls when the monopoly of land is broken. We are also justified in assuming that as the struggle for the necessities of life is ended, the motives for energy will become more moral and spiritual. That is about all we know. Therefore, when we have approached nearer to Socialism than we are now, different combina- tions of motives from those with which we have to deal will animate men, and so proposals regarding pay and reward which would be 114 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT laughed at now as Utopian may in the course of time become severely practical. This also is the answer to such objections as that Socialism is impossible till human nature changes. Human nature is always changing, not in the sense of becoming new as when one puts off one suit of clothes and puts on another, but in the sense that the complex instincts, habits, 'opinions and motives of which it is composed, change their relative importance and produce different resultants in consequence. The Socialist method is that of moving out .st< '|> by step and of walking by sight and by faith at the same time. 5. The Scientific Method. The scientific method employs the processes of both induction and deduction. It groups its facts, it marshals it> particulars, it pieces together its bypot In •-<■>■. then assuming its hypotheses and its systems, it explains its facts and its particulars by them. Galileo's experi- ments with falling bodies from which he arrived at the laws governing the rate at which a body falls through space, consisted of a group- ing of ascertained facts; he enunciated the fact that a projectile travels on a parabolic path by a grouping of a more complicated set of facts; on the other hand, Darwin's work consisted not so much in proving the theory of evolution from a series of grouped facts (though he did that more than any of his prede- cessors), but in using that theory to explain V SOCIALIST METHOD 115 facts, and so to this day we hear occasional disputes as to whether the Darwinian method was inductive or deductive, whereas, as a mat- ter of fact, it was a scientific blending of both. The Socialist method is the Darwinian method. It begins with social phenomena, with the rational desire to group them in systems, and with the equally rational desire to discover their causes and visualise their complete ful- filment. Its interest consists in the whence and whither of society. What are the facts in which it is interested to begin with? They may be grouped under the generic term of poverty. I have shown that the source of this poverty is not only in personal shortcomings. If that were so, the interest which is the origin of the Socialist movement would only have raised a moral and an educational problem. The source of poverty being largely social, being a recurring breakdown of the productive and distributive machinery of society, has created a sociological problem with economic, political and moral aspects. In short, the Socialist sees a machine that will not work, an engine which is always slowing up and breaking down, and he studies its mechanism to discover its faults. He finds that its parts do not work together, that its driving force is not properly distributed, that it generates an enormous amount of friction, and that all this arises because the machine has been thrown together by minds which had no conception of the complete plan of the mechanism, but which made a cylinder, and a wheel, and a piston separately and apart, and 116 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT then tried to beat and hammer them all to- gether into something like co-operative action. Such a machine cannot work, and such is modern industrial society. The next step follows naturally upon the first. I have been using mechanical similes, but they are imperfect when applied to society, because they do not reflect that social char- acteristic of steady and consistent adaptation which is rather orgnaie than mechanical in its likeness. In .society, the Socialist discovers this tendency of readjustment to secure economy in the expenditure of energy. The law of re- adjustment pervades all life. The deaf develop the faculty of quick virion or sensitive touch, the blind of keen hearing. The plant in new Surroundings, either by adaptation or by natu- ral selection, changes it> leaves, its flower, its fruit, its roots, so as to protect its life. The animal DOWS to the same necessity. This adap- tation may be the result of something akin to what we call consciousness, it may be merely a mechanical adjustment between thing and circumstance; but the result is the same — variations which are economies in life. So, superfluous organs atrophy and disappear. No organism can flourish hampered by useless or clumsy organs. Now, when the Socialist searches society for evidence of the operations of this law r of adjust- ment he discovers it all round him in the form of gropings after more co-operation and more organisation. He finds law controlling economic power and imposing social responsibilities upon individual ownership. He finds the common SOCIALIST METHOD 117 will and the common well-being putting a bridle on the neck of the individual will and the indi- vidual interest. Thus he sees society begin- ning to assert itself again as a personality of all the persons, absorbing and transforming individual advantage into common advantage. The weak are no longer left unprotected against the strong. Children are educated, and steps are being taken to vindicate their right to food, clothing, medical attendance, play. These steps are hesitating and they have not been well considered; but they indicate the existence of a social will working for a common advantage. The same is true regarding women, whose physi- ology and psychology make them economically weaker than men; it is true of the aged; it is becoming true of the unemployed. From this investigation the Socialist rises with a clear conception of the social will and conscience becoming active in establishing a system of protection of the unequally circumstanced, which will secure to each individual an adequate measure of individual development and free- dom. He believes that that is to continue. What is now merely sympathetic, will become rational; what is detached will become syste- matic. The rights of children, for instance, will soon have to be related not only to the con- venience of the state but to the responsibilities of parents, and the responsibilities of parents will in turn have to be set in a system of family organisation far stronger than what can ever be experienced under capitalism. All this the Socialist works out from what he sees going on round about him. He completes "the broken 118 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT arc"; he carries on in idea the tendency which he sees beginning to operate now; from the walls of the temple so far built, he can antici- pate the architect's idea, continue the lines, and form some conception of the completed fabric. The same thing is true regarding the capitalist control of industry. The law of economy is at work here too. Concentration is going on. The individual capitalist gave birth to the joint stock company, the joint stock company gave birth to the trust. The village market was merged in the national market, and that in turn was merged in the world's market. Separate businesses in related processes of pro- duction and distribution were united, and after that more kindred businesses were added and all controlled from one centre. Thus concen- tration and co-ordination proceed apace. Still, there are great gaps in the growing order. Land, labour and capital are far from harmoniously co-operating in the production of wealth. And the Socialist, seeing what has been done, and discovering the rational principle upon which it has proceeded, can project into the future the further embodiments of this principle, and from what is going on make the most effective preparations for the completion of the work. Similarly, regarding what is really the crux of the whole problem: What interests are to control the new order? The whole community or a class? — the Socialist pursues the same process of inquiry. He finds that the control of the land is beginning to pass into the hands of the community. This is particularly notice- SOCIALIST METHOD 119 able in new settlements, like Australia, where forethought is determining legislation and where that forethought is not hampered by deeply- rooted vested interests. But the pressure of circumstances is also compelling older states like Germany and ourselves to act in the same way. He also finds that many services, like the supply of gas, water, trams and trains, are being taken from private management and pro- vided by the municipality or the central gov- ernment. These services are monopolies for the establishment of which the public consent is required, and they are being municipalised for reasons of public convenience and profit. An- other group of services is passing under public control for reasons of general health and well- being. The erection of working-class dwellings and the supply of milk by municipalities are typical of this kind of service, and the medical inspection of school children lies in the same category. In this movement towards muni- cipalisation we have a proof that the commu- nity, as an organised whole, is to control in its own interests those forms of capital, the use of which is vital to its own well-being, and is making itself responsible for services, the quali- ties of which must be kept high, but which competition and private interests lower. Con- trol by inspectors is the first stage, but in the end responsibility for direct service is being accepted by the more enlightened and pro- gressive municipalities of the world. "This is not Socialism," reply many critics. It is not, but it is the earnest of Socialism. For the Socialist sees that many forms of capital 120 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT and many public services are assuming, with time, the characteristics of those which with an all but common consent are passing under public management. In Great Britain, the very same reasons which justified the municipalisa- tion of trams exist to justify the nationalisation of canals and railways; we are on the verge of a great revolution in the care of public health, which will bring us near to some form of na- tionalisation of the medical service; in countries like America where the trust has firmly estab- lished itself and has already shown its full social results of good and evil, the cry is being raised: "Let the nation own the trusts." Such is the Socialist survey not merely of things as they have been and now are, but of the drift of things. The oceanographer puts out his little floats and the currents carry them hither and thither; thus the investigator knows whither the waters run, and he maps the path of the drifting streams until he has mastered the circulating system of the sea. The natu- ralist gets his bone or his tooth, and from it he can build up, limb upon limb, muscle upon muscle, organ upon organ, the unknown animal of which these things were parts. The student of human nature from a casual remark, a glimpse of a man's library, his poise in walking, can tell what manner of man he has met and his life lies open to the observing eye like a book. So the sociologist, by studying the social changes going on around him can map the drift of prog- ress; by noting the motives and the assump- tions upon which men act, can trace the course of history through some part of the misty future; SOCIALIST METHOD 121 by discovering the dream cities which men have built in their hearts as abiding places for their souls, can tell what social fabrics they are to raise by legislation and administration as dwell- ing-places' for their reason. CHAPTER VII WIT AT SOCIALISM IS NOT An examination of some of the objections urged against, and the fears entertained regard- ing, Socialism will enable me to explain its principles and elucidate its methods and point of view still more clearly. 1. Anarchism and Communism First of all I shall deal with thr relation of Socialism a> a system of political and econo- mic thought t«i other systems with which it is often confused — particularly with Communism and Anarchism. Communism presupposes a common store of wealth which i> to be drawn upon by the indi- vidual consumer, not in accordance with ser- vices rendered, but in response to "a human right to sustenance." It may be in accordance with Communist principles to make this right to consume depend upon the duty of helping to produce, and to exile from the economic community every one who declines to fulfil that duty. Some communists insist that one of the certain results of their system will be the 122 WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 123 creation of so much moral robustness that in practice this question will never arise for actual answer. But be that as it may, the distribu- tive philosophy of Communism is as I have stated, and it contains the difference between that system and Socialism. "From all accord- ing to their ability; to each according to his needs" is a Communist, not a Socialist, formula. The Socialist would insert "services" for "needs." They both agree about the common stock; they disagree regarding the nature of what should be the effective claim of the individual to share in it. Socialists think of distribution through the channels of personal income; Com- munists think of distribution through the chan- nels of human rights to live. Hence Socialism requires some medium of exchange whether it is pounds sterling or labour notes; Communism requires no such medium of exchange. The difference can best be illustrated if we remem- ber the difference between a customer going to a grocer and buying sugar, and a child of the family claiming a share of that sugar next morn- ing at the breakfast table. Or the position may be stated in this way: Socialism accepts the idea of income, subject to two safeguards. It must be adequate to afford a satisfactory standard of life, and it must represent services given and not merely a power to exploit the labour of others. Communism only considers the sum total required by an individual to satisfy his wants and would limit consumption only as regards the use to which it is put. Communist economic theories are often joined to Anarchist political ones, and in this con- 124 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT junction are not unrarely confused with Social- ism. Anarchism as a political theory (as a mode of political action the word has a totally different significance) is the negation of the coercive -fate, and there is far more in common between it and anti-Socialist individualism of the Herbert Spencer type than between it and Socialism, of which it is indeed the direct anti- thesis. The Anarchist theory presupposes either no state, or a state bound together by moral and social motives by which is maintained a purely voluntary relationship. So we may ex- press the difference between Socialism and Anarchism as being political, the one believing in the continuance of the legislative, and there- fore coervice, state, the other believing only in an administrative and voluntary state. 1 An- archism is in reality a form of individualism and cannot be dissociated from individualistic theories. There is another difference. Underlying the philosophy of Anarchism is the belief in the goodness of human nature, which, with the exception of the doctrines of Fourier also shines so brightly in the beliefs and expectations of the earlier Socialists. The Socialism of to-day does not build itself up upon the goodness, but upon the sociality, of human nature. Besides, as a matter of experience, all over the world, from France to America and from 1 It is true that some of the fathers of modern Socialism wrote of the final disappearance of the state, but as I have shown elsewhere — Socialism and Government — this is only a verbal declaration, the idea of the state being essential to Socialism. WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 125 Italy to Japan, the Anarchist movement is in conflict with the Socialist movement, and the earlier history of modern Socialism is storm- swept by. the furious conflicts of Anarchism with Socialism. And yet, by a curious twist- ing of actual fact, many people associate these two opposing systems of political thought, as though they were the same, the reason probably being that every kind of opposition to the exist- ing order is grouped together and made identical in minds not accustomed to discriminate in an intelligent way. 2. The Abolition of Private Property. An examination of the current notions re- garding the Socialist view about property and what is indeed the real view is equally enlight- ening. The common idea is that Socialism proposes to abolish private property. That is no less mistaken than is the view that Socialism and Anarchism are one and the same thing. Private property in one of its aspects is a limi- tation of the liberty of the woods, under which he who had the power took what he wanted, and of the struggle for life — although it may be used to revive this ancient form of liberty and this objectionable method of selection. It puts an end to the strife of keeping — although it may be used to exploit. It runs counter to the physical struggle of the survival of the fittest individual and secures the survival of the fittest community. Of all that Socialism approves, and it consequently aims at elimi- 126 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT nating the evil consequences of private prop- erty and realising its desirable possibilities. Its proposals and views regarding private property form part of its general purpose of preventing the growth of private interests which prey upon, or are otherwise antagonistic to, social well-being. It is said that the existing system is based upon the right to private posaesmoiL That, however, is a profound mistake. The oft- quoted pronouncement of John Stuart Mill may be quoted again, for it has lost none of its force and none of its truth. lie wrote: 1 'Tin- reward, instead <>f being proportioned to the labour and abstinence of the individ- ual is almost in an inverse ratio to it: those who receive the least, labour and abstain the most." That is, indeed, the position. How any one after reading the reports of any investigation made into social conditions to-day, or after studying the statistics of wealth distribution in this or any other industrial country, can con- tinue to harbour the delusion that society is kept going because the individual possesses private property, is unthinkable. The facts do not fit in with the theory. One of the most drama tii- features of society to-day is the vast number included in the propertyless class. Nine-tenths of the wage-earners of the country work with no thought of accumulating prop- erty, but with the sole idea of making ends meet day by day, and week by week; the re- 1 Fortnightly Renew, 1879, p. 226. WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 127 mainder see no fairer prospect ahead than the saving of enough money to invest in some in- surance club or to lay by in preparation for the inevitable time of trade depression and unem- ployment. , If it were true that men will work only to own property there is not the induce- ment for a single week's hard manual labour in modern society. The significance of working- class savings is constantly exaggerated. Only in the very rarest of instances do they give extra enjoyment or mean a higher standard of life; in nearly every case they simply lie in reserve lest a misfortune should come, and they are not sufficient to remove or to modify the one economic motive which makes the working classes toil, namely, the fear of speedy hard- ship if they cease to toil. They are useful in the day of trouble; they are not large enough to be of appreciable value in the day of steady work. If men could be insured against un- employment and sickness, the workman's sav- ings would cease to have any influence upon his life. Only a few, a very small class, enjoy to-day the pleasure and the freedom which comes from private property, and a great part of that class has ceased to give active service to society. They loan money rather than use it; they abstract rents rather than make profits. Though it may have been true some time ago that the stream constantly flowing from the status of workman to that of employer, gladdened the heart of the workman and held out prospects to him that one day he might embark on its waters, that stream is very narrow and very 128 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT shallow now, and, in comparison with the mul- titudes who never start upon it or who sink in its upper reaches, those who navigate successfully are insignificant in numbers. Nor are the prizes so good. The master with his independence, his property privileges and liber- ties, his dignity, has become a manager, a direc- tor, with no dignity and very little honour. He has become merely a rich man, and the glamour which civic office, local influence and general respect used to throw upon riches has gone, and has left them cold, glaring and vul- gar. Hence the recent changes in business organisation have altered the nature of the appeal that is made to the ambitious plebeian. A generation or two ago the man rose to honour, and that had a selective effect upon the kind of man who rose; now-a-days the man rises to money, to salary, to warehouse and factory authority, and nothing more, and that also has a selective effect on the kind of man who rises. The second method of selection gives poorer results than the fir>t. Not only do the facts of wealth distribution contradict the assumption that it is the pos- s< ->ion of private property which is the basis of our society, but the kind of enjoyment at- tached to commercial success which is being evolved by business changes is not so great as that which, so far as social respect and per- sonal liberty are concerned, was the lot of the business man who managed his own capital and felt himself and his wealth integral parts of his town to be spent in the service of the town. WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 129 The truth is that society to-day is based on the fact that the majority of people can never acquire enough private property to give them much liberty of action and choice in con- sumption, and that is one of the gravest charges brought against it by Socialism. The reward for which men work to-day, is not private prop- erty, but a week's wages. Now, what is the Socialist view? The Socialist assumes that individuality re- quires private property through which to express itself. Man must control and own something, otherwise he does not control and own him- self. And as Socialism is not a cut-and-dried set of dogmas to be pieced into a system like one of those puzzles made by cutting up a pic- ture into many confusing fragments, but an idea which is to be realized by a continuation of experimental change, we may rest assured that none of the incidents which are to be met with on the way will abolish private property. The ownership of things will always be a means of expressing personality, and this fact will not be forgotten in the evolution of Socialism. Indeed some Socialists — for instance Kautsky, the most uncompromising of Marxists — have stated that people might own their own houses and their own gardens under Socialism, and provided there is a proper system of taxation intercepting unearned income in the shape of economic rent there is nothing in this concession contrary to Socialist theory. It also follows from this that objection to inheritance is not an essential part of the So- cialist system. The Socialist need not object 130 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT to the bequeathing of private property as such; he only objects to bequeathing it under condi- tions which determine that the inheritance of the multitude must be poverty. In discussing this and kindred questions two guiding facts ought to be kept in mind. The fir>t is that Socialism, on its moral side, is a means to tin 1 establishment of true individual liberty; and the second that Socialism, on its economic side, is a system under which an end will be put to exploitation. The second pur- pose of Socialism i> thai which sets the bounds to the ownership of private property. All through history the limitation of the subjects and the rights of property has pro- ceeded side by side with the expansion of liberty. Property in human beings has had to be denied, but it was defended most stoutly and was held to be an unassailable right by philosophers and humanists, as well as by the cl offOCfl that enjoyed it. And yet the mere liberation of the human body from the BCope of private property IS not sufficient, because it has been found that the human will — the human personality— can be put in bondage through certain forms of eco- nomic possession, so that unless men are to abandon their pilgrimage in search of liberty they must supplement their anti-slavery cam- paigns with campaigns designed to put an end to private property in those economic forces which may be used to produce a slavery of the will. Now, how is property used at the present time? In the first place, its chief function to-day, from my present point of view, is that of ex- *■ WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 131 ploitation. In the form of capital it is required by labour, and with the increase in the amount of capital required to carry on modern industry labour finds it increasingly difficult to be more than the agent of capital and to avoid being the slave of capital. Ledger balances, not moral or human considerations, assign a place to labour in the industrial system. And as labour loses its power to bargain effectively with capital, 1 it becomes more liable to be ground down in the competitive market in which it is subject to the same laws as any other com- modity. Thus it has come about that the ownership of property, justified as it is by the fundamental characteristics and the most primi- tive requirements of human nature, becomes an instrument for depriving great masses of people of property. The private ownership of the means of production implies the private owner- ship, by the same class, of the products them- selves, and that again implies the exploitation of the workman and his condemnation to a state of poverty. Thus the present system upholds private property in such a way as to confine private property to a comparatively small class in the community. The present system fails to do the very thing which it proposes to do, because its lack of design means that it defeats itself in its own working. It is like a man so disorganised in his nerve centres that every time he lifts his hand to strike some one else he injures him- self. 1 Cf. Chap, II„ p. 50. 132 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT This is particularly true of private property in natural monopolies, like land. The experi- ence of every people in the world, whether it be a barbaric tribe or a civilised nation, is that, when land becomes subject to private proprie- torship, poverty inevitably follows. In consequence of this the Socialist has come to the conclusion that where industrial capital is not the subject of communal control and use, and where natural monopolies arc in the pos- sesion of individuals, it is economically impos- sible for masses of people to acquire private property at all. The socialisation of certain fnnns of property is a condition necessary for the genera] diffusion <>f private property. The nationalisation of industrial capital and of the laud is therefore not the fir>t stage of the aboli- tion of all private property, but is exactly the opposite. The result of the operations of a society which allows private property in every- thing, is determinedly a law of concentration and accumulation, the effect of which may be expressed in biblical language: "Into every one that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." The idea that capitalist so- ciety is based on private property is a mere chimera. 3. The Negation of Liberty. So too as regards liberty. A common view of Socialism is that it will crush liberty out by its laws, regulations and uniformities. Those WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 133 who take this view look upon Socialism as a ponderous organisation under which the state will own everything and prescribe how people are to do things, what trades they are to follow, and how .they are to employ their leisure moments. The first answer — and indeed it is the only one worth making — to these objectors is that if they really know what Socialism means, and if their description of it is not a caricature, it is so absurdly irrational and so contrary to human nature and purpose that no one can advocate it except those with twists in their minds, and no community of men will ever adopt it. Socialism would then be but an aberration of the human intellect, and so far from being a serious movement, it would only be a curiosity. This conclusion, however, is so inconsistent with what we know of the intel- lectual strength of the Socialist ranks, so in- consistent too with its power upon the minds of men, that it must be drawn from premises of error. And that is so. The critical de- scription of Socialism to which I have just referred is a mere clumsy caricature. I have just explained the Socialist position regarding property, and from that it must have been clear that one of the specifically declared intentions of Socialists is to create the condi- tions of liberty. Hitherto our ideas of liberty have been narrowed and misled by the pursuit of political liberty. We are just at the end of the liberal epoch, and the liberal epoch is that of the middle and the commercial classes, the classes which enjoyed economic power, and which 134 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT therefore had to agitate for, and philosophise about, political enfranchisement only. From their particular point of view political enfran- chisement was precious as a stamp of social status and as a means of destroying certain inequalities and impediments which the com- mercialist nineteenth century inherited from the militarist middle ages. Thus the liberty of the liberal epoch meant a condition in which a comparatively small Dumber of people held economic power in a state whose positive po- [itical activities were reduced to a minimum. The ring of life was to be kept clear and the heavy-weights were to be allowed to dominate it. Such a view of liberty could not be more than a passing thing, could not yield accept- able fruits. Hut that is the intellectual inher- itance with which this generation is encum- bered. We have to begin anew our search for the talisman. First of all, we have to understand that lib- erty is conditioned; and then we have to under- stand that it is something which relates to qualities, and not only to quantities. It is conditioned, for if a man is dependent upon another man's bounty for his very exist- ence, he may live under a state of the most beautiful moral anarchism and yet be a slave. I have shown that owing to the enormous growth of the economic power in modern society, the real effective control on man's outgoings and incomings is becoming more and more economic. To express this, the Socialist uses the term wage-slavery. Much objection is taken to this term, in the elaboration of which we are treated V WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 135 to instructive lessons on the characteristic fea- tures of chattel-slavery, all of which are beside the mark, simply because wage-slavery is not chattel-slavery, and no Socialist confuses the one with the other. The characteristic feature of wage-slavery is that men are absolutely de- pendent for their living upon other men in an economic system the workings of which they cannot control — that the machine, the market, the hierarchy of commercial magnates hold the man in their keeping. Or it may be put in the form of a self-evident proposition thus: If liberty is conditioned, he who controls the con- ditions controls the liberty. This is one of the reasons why Socialists assert that commerce and the capital required for carrying it on must be under collective, and not individual, control. But, it is said, whilst the Socialist would submit the economic conditions of liberty to communal control, that control under Socialism would become a tyranny in other ways. It would fashion laws and regulations which would hamper liberty and put shackles upon individual initiative and action. This consideration is serious only to those who have never grasped the democratic char- acter of the Socialist state. For that state will not be a vast centralised bureaucracy with its head-quarters in imperial offices in White- hall. Already, thanks very largely to Socialist influences, decentralisation is beginning to ap- pear in our system of administration, and we are preparing to consider views which will have very far-reaching practical importance regard- 136 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT ing the relations between central and local legislation and administration. The tendency to decentralise will undoubtedly proceed pari passu with the tendency of the state to co-operate more definitely with the individual in working out his liberty. When this truly democratic view of the state is definitely grasped, the ominous character of the objections I am now considering changes. The frown melts into a smile. The officers who call upon happy families to take to a state institution the latest born so that it may grow ii]) under the inspiring impartiality of a number rather than be weighted and prejudiced by a soft-hearted mother and a family name, appear to be nothing more substantial than the hob- goblins of our youthful days which made us lie awake at nights or run home in the dark with our hair on end. Whole troops of anti- Socialist horrors dissolve into something less real than shadows when sane adults look at them a second time. Like all crowds, all tribes, all companion- ships, the Socialist community will be swayed by two contrary motions, the coercion of dis- cipline (the common life) and the freedom of will (the individual life); and each will have an absolute sway in some fields, and in others will have to accept compromises, limitations and modifications. But the problems which this conflict will create will belong to the Socialist state itself, which will certainly not be a stag- nant state, and they need not be discussed in detail now. All that has to be done at present is to emphasise the fact that the impulses which WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 137 have driven men so far on the road in search of liberty will cross the Socialist boundary and remain in full operation after that. And we must also insist that laws and regu- lations are "not only not antagonistic to liberty, but are the very conditions of liberty. They are the expressions of the social life; they are the signs of warning, the directing finger posts which the experience of the past has set up for the guidance of the future; they are the wisdom which men have picked up on the way. They are, so to speak, the hard bony structure of conduct which supports — and which alone can support — the mobile activities through which the free will finds play. Moreover, they are what may be called the economies of liberty. For liberty is like wealth, in that it should be carefully used if it is to fulfil its purpose. Laws and regulations prevent its misuse, and make easy its proper use. Where two persons use the road, they have to devise some rule of the road; where two persons do business, they have to agree to the conditions of contract; where two persons form a community, they have to provide for common liberty as well as for individual freedom. Liberty is an adjust- ment of opposites. When Liberty is sovereign, Control is her chief adviser. Indeed, liberty in a society becomes a depart- ment of duty, not of right, because individual activity can so easily become anti-social and destructive. Consequently, liberty is less a matter of breadths, than of heights and depths and of infinite extensions ahead. The liberty of a boat on a river is not to go hither and 138 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT thither from bank to bank as the whim of the helmsman directs, but to keep its course accord- ing to the rules. From this view, one cannot blot out the fact that liberty ultimately must depend on human quality. The good man alone is free, and the good man is he who is conscious of his social obligations. "Take my yoke upon you" has been the advice of every great ethical teacher to men in search of liberty. Every restraint upon human activity, every form of restrictive islation, is not wise, and is not Socialism. Por restrainl and law are but means towards ends and must accept the test which the complete Socialist theory itself must accept: Ifl it rational!-' Is it necessary? Is it a con- tribution to B wider freedom? But certain it is that when liberty is at last found — if that treasure is ever to be found by unhappy man — it will be in an organised state with just laws and a well-devised system of mutual protection and aid. 4. Equality . And there is one other aim which pilgrim man seems to be seeking to which reference must be made. Underlying the aphorism of Kant that every man is an end in himself is a claim that there is something so special in the possession of human qualities, that it en- titles men to stand on a plane of equality one with another. This claim has been associated with Socialism, and its critics have thereupon started on many a mad wild-goose chase after V WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 1S9 their own shadow. They even believe that they have run the thing to earth. For it is asked, How can men be equal? Equal in what? And so on. What dp Socialists mean by equality? They mean that the inequalities in the tastes, the powers, the capacities of men may have some chance of having a natural outlet, so that they may each have an opportunity to contribute their appropriate services to society. The co- operation of unlikes and inequalities in the production of a harmonious whole is the So- cialist's view of the perfect community; at the same time it is his view of the only equality which human nature has ever sought. This is not an aim which can be reached at a given moment in life. It means that at stage after stage in the development of a personality oppor- tunities should be given to it to advance in certain directions, so that in the end the man of artistic imagination may not find himself bound behind a grocer's counter, or the youth of mathematical genius be sent as a "little piecer" to a Lancashire cotton mill. Consequently, the purpose is generally stated as being to secure "equality of opportunity." Every child starts with every door open in front of him and as he goes on he finds no one closed against him which he can profitably enter. It is somewhat difficult to deny the justice and desirability of such a plan, and as a rule the Socialist is met, not with that opposition, but with arguments showing that Socialism far less than capitalism will solve the problem of how to keep poets away from the backs of counters HO THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT and young mathematicians from mules. With that I shall deal in the next chapter. Mr. Mullock, however, is bold enough to try and enter the lists against us on the merits of the idea itself. Nobody misunderstands Socialism so courageously as Mr. Mallock, and I refer to his argument in order to make the Socialist idea clear. He says ■ that the idea is purely abstract and has to be brought down into touch with actuality. And this IS how he does it. It implies, he says, that at the beginning of industrial life all should start at the same place and in the same path. That is absurd. If tu<> boys start German together, he argues, one will learn faster than the other, and there- fore there is no equality of opportunity between them. Which again i> absurd, for the equal start i> the equality asked for. His third point is that under Socialism an employee of a state factory would have no more equality of oppor- tunity than an employee of a private concern. Whether he has or has not may be a debatable point, but as I shall try to show in my next chapter Socialist industrial organisation will allow the be^t men the widest scope of useful- ness which can only be secured by equal oppor- tunities for those who run equal up to the point of entering industrial life. He then turns to discuss inventions and inventors, and returns to his subject to point out that failures must be weeded out — a certain result of equality of opportunity. This brings him to wind up his argument, and in surveying it a suspicion seems 1 A Critical Examination of Socialism. Chap. XV. WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 141 to have stolen into his mind that he had to pin up its rather fragile structure. So he admits that "an equality of opportunity which is rela- tive" (whatever that may mean) may be a useful ideal, but that "the absolute equality which is contemplated by the Socialists [wher- ever he got that notion] is an ideal which either could not be realised at all," etc. etc. He set out to discuss equality of opportunity to use faculties; he concluded by pointing out the absurdity of supposing that every man could do the same thing, rise through life in the same way, demand the same kind of facilities, and test, at the expense of the state, whether he was really as great a genius as he himself believed — not one of these points being involved in the proposition which they are supposed to destroy. Mr. Mullock's fifteenth chapter is an admirable illustration of the intellectual quality of the greater bulk of anti-Socialist criticism, and I have only referred to it because it has enabled me to throw up into clearer light what the Socialist view of equality is by indicating what it is not. 5. Economic Determinism. There is another class of objections to which it will be most convenient to refer at this point. They arise from the mistakes of Socialists them- selves, and are an inheritance from the first generation of "scientific Socialists." It was necessary that Marx and his contemporaries should attempt to devise some shibboleth which would sharply mark off Socialism from other 142 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT theories of social reformation and from vague expressions of philanthropic goodness, and not a few of these attempts have suffered and have failed because, in addition to embodying what is essential to a Socialist creed, they have also reflected what were the personal views of the writers on unessential matters, or they have been coloured and moulded in the thought of the time when they were first stated. I shall deal with two of them. Socialism to-day suffers because it has re- ( d an inheritance of scientific materialism from the middle of the nineteenth century, when the intellect of the West was occupied and entranced by the discoveries of biological science, by the rude shaking which biological evolution gave to spiritual expressions and phenomena, by the systematic orderliness in which economic explanations set many histori- cal events, and by the enthusiasm for materia alist solutions which was natural to the time. This gave rise to the shibboleth of the materi- alist conception of history, which a section of Socialist thought still tries to impose on the Socialist movement. The materialist concep- tion of history is the view that the motive for historical change has been primarily economic. Indeed, by using the word "motive" I weaken the necessitarian character of the materialist theory. For, strictly speaking, motive is alien to it. It works mechanically. The expression "economic determinism" conveys the idea more accurately. This theory, which was held by the fathers of modern Socialism, is a charac- teristic production of the thought of the middle V WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 143 of the nineteenth century. The influence of physical conditions upon human action was then a plaything of the intellectuals, and the toy was handled with the most whole-hearted affec- tion by Buckle in his History of Civilization; but Buckle was an individualist of the most rigid kind, so the theory itself is not of neces- sity Socialist. It was a revolt — an exaggera- tion of a new and attractive explanation of historical evolution. It drew history away from the dimly understood realms of the spirit and of destiny which really belonged to revealed religion, and from explanations of the vaguest kind, and made it a deduction from climate, from soil,' from geography, from geology and above all, from personal and class interest. The theory was so very simple, so very sweep- ing and comprehensive, explained so much, and was so very new, that the Socialist was bound to adopt it because the existing order which produced the very ugly social features of which he was the sworn enemy was generally defended on theological and metaphysical grounds, or was presented as the fruit of the work of great men, with the result that it seemed to be out- side the realm of reason altogether and not subject to a law of evolution. Suddenly a new scientific idea exploded the whole of this, as Guy Fawkes proposed to explode James I and his Parliament. History became a record of social evolution; society had an orderly process of change as well as man or a grain of sand. Kings and nobles were functionaries; reigns were mere commas in the story — sometimes not even so much — and not the beginnings and 144 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT endings of paragraphs and chapters. One epoch produced the next, the explanation being that economic adjustments were taking place, and that these adjustments were constantly mar- shalling and re-marshalling the armies of re- action and progress, which for ever were coming into conflict with each other and changing the balance of power within nations and also the methods by which that power was used and expressed. To no active propa- ganda of the time did the secularisation of historical theory yield more immediate or more abundant fruit than it did to the propaganda of Socialism. Hut the materialist conception of history is after all one-sided and inadequate. The ser- vice it rendered was the establishment of the Bcience of history by the setting up of a de- ductive method as well as an inductive one. Having rendered that service the toy began to show signs of wear. It did not satisfy every need. It did not meet every emergency. Its assumptions can never be displaced from the motives in history, but they cannot explain events when considered absolutely and alone. The progress of man is not solely inspired by his pocket, nor by the soil upon which he lives, although these things must always be factors. The hill tribe must have different characteris- tics from the plain tribe. The exploited people must come into frequent conflict with their exploiters. A wealthy class of disfranchised people must knock at the gates of citizenship demanding admission. But in these conflicts every human quality must have been awak- WHAT SOCIALIST IS NOT 145 ened and must act as allies. Moreover, looking into the future, as true education spreads and comfort becomes more real, the more materi- alist motives are bound to diminish in their importance jn relation to the intellectual and moral ones. If self-respect were a wide-spread virtue in England to-day, the conflict of the House of Lords with the House of Commons would be much more disastrous to the former than it will be if the economic interests involved are the only incentives to the contest. It is the mind of man, with its ideals, its sense of right and wrong, and its aspirations which makes economic poverty and injustice a serious grievance and gives them that explosiveness which makes them a cause of revolution. We now see all this, and in marshalling the motives which make for change, and which accom- plished what change has hitherto taken place, we give due place to those that are intellec- tual, as well as those that are materialist and economic. The materialist conception of history is, therefore, in no way essential to the Socialist theory. It undoubtedly was of enormous ser- vice to that theory about the middle of last century, but its service to Socialism was of precisely the same nature as its service to the science of history. The Socialist theory de- pends upon a conception of history which shows the gradual evolution of event, of epoch, of organisation; it does not depend upon any one explanation of why history does present that orderly progress. Indeed, that is conclusively shown in the H6 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT writings of Marx and Engels themselves. When the opponents of Socialism seek to raise preju- dice in their favour by quotations from these writers which smack of economic determinism, they glean their extracts from the earlier state- ments of the theory written when, as Engels afterwards explained, "there was not always time, place and opportunities to do justice to the other considerations concerned in and affected by it," (the economic factor). 1 All that either .Marx or Engels (Marx putting more emphasis on the economic factor than Engels, perhaps) meant to argue for was that the economic factor waa the prime moving cause. The other causes could not operate without it; it awakened them into activity. I may use the words of Engels himself written to the magazine from which I have already quoted: 'The political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic- evolution rests on the economic evolution. But they all react on one another and on the eco- nomic basis." Thus, at best, the problem resolves itself into the relative value of the various creative forces, and, at worst, into a vain contention similar to that as to whether the egg or the hen is first in creation. When the theory was new, it had to chal- lenge in a most aggressive way those that held the field. It had to be couched in dogmas of sharp cutting hardness. That is the history of most theories. They claim absolute validity at first and are satisfied in the end by a rec- ognition of the fact that they are of relative importance. * 1 Letter in the Sozialistischen Akademiker, October, 1895. WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 147 6. Class War. Another inheritance from the imperfect views which had \o guide the early Socialists is the theory of the class war. Here again, the super- ficial statement is one of facts of which we have illustrations every day. Wage-earners com- bine in trade unions. Employers combine in federations. Strikes and lockouts are declared. Trouble arises about wages, hours, exploitation, and so on. In politics the rich tend to drift together, and the active and intelligent poor tend to drift together. A temperance bill finds "the trade" organised to a man. A land tax finds the landowners and property-holders in general ready to defend all their incomes, and to announce that if they are attacked, the whole of the social fabric is threatened. This is nothing but a class war so far as it goes. The Socialist, however, has to consider what is the value of these facts for his propaganda and for the realisation of his ideal state. What do they mean and how much do they mean? One thing is quite evident. The existence of a class struggle is of no importance to Socialism unless it rouses intellectual and moral antago- nism, for it is only that antagonism which leads to progreassive chnge. And this explains best why the Socialist condemns this struggle which has become repulsive because it creates con- ditions of injustice, because it results in chaos and because it defeats the realisation of the ideal state of peace and comfort which the lead- 148 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT ing spirits of mankind have always placed before them as a goal. The motive force of Socialism is therefore not the struggle, but the condem- nation of the struggle by the creative imagi- native intelligence and by the moral sense. The conflict is an incident in an evolution towards complete social harmony, and the motive for the evolution is not economic but intellectual and moral. The Socialist, therefore, cannot consistently address himself to class sentiment or class prejudice. He ought, indeed, to look away from it, because any victory won as the result of siding with one party in the struggle only perpetuates what he desires to eliminate. The appeal to class interest is an appeal to the existing order, whether the class addressed is the rich or the poor. It is the anti-Socialist who makes class appeals; the Socialist makes social appeals. Class consciousness is an asset of the defenders of the existing order of exploi- tation. It is evident in the wide social gulf fixed between Liberals and Conservatives, it is behind the boycott of Liberal shopkeepers by Primrose dames, it is the reason for the advice given through The Times at the end of 1910 to society hostesses to send no invitations to Liberal ministers. The class war found its way into the gen- eral body of Socialist dogma quite simply. Marx saw that no proletarian movement could be created in Europe without some passion. The wage-earners had to feel the enemy. They had to be marshalled as a class. The theory of economic determinism in history was a theory of a war of classes. By a conflict between V WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT 149 economic classes progress had come. Economic determinism, therefore, not only laid a scien- tific basis for Socialism, but also provided it with a method. But as the determinist argu- ment was modified, the class war view had to suffer a corresponding modification. When the doctrine of economic determinism was preached in its absoluteness, the class war in all its naked antagonism was a logical corollary; when other than economic factors form the evolutionary drift of society, other motives than those of class interest must form the political parties that are consciously aiding the Socialist evolu- tion. When Engels wrote the apologetic con- fession which I have just quoted, he also threw the class war as it had been understood up to then out of the armoury of Socialist arguments. The idea of the class war no longer represents the motive forces organising Socialism and forming the Socialist movement. Those who still use it are like those more backward re- ligious communities which express their theolo- gies in the terms used before there was a science of geology. CHAPTER VIII THE IMMEDIATE DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM 1. Democracy. Bearing in mind that the watchword of Socialism is Evolution, not Revolution, and that its battlefield La Parliament, its immediate programme becomes of the utmost importance. In this programme, as in the Socialist theory itself, there are to be found some interesting survivals of a historic past. The revolutionary republicanism of 1848 can be traced both in proposals to abolish the monarchy and to repu- diate the National Debt which one meets with iu some programmes which seem to have been kept as sacred from the touch of change as some rooms in ancient places where the Merry Monarch slept or the Young Pretender hastily laid his head. In democratically gov- erned countries where Socialism has had to take its place in the political conflict of actuali- ties not only have these antiquities been left behind amongst the discarded baggage, but they hardly influence Socialist thought. The virtues of republicanism and the conveniences of a monarchy are subjects of abstract interest which may ruffle for an hour the surface of debating societies, but in this country and 150 DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM 151 under present circumstances, they do not cause a ripple in Parliamentary controversy or take up a line in Parliamentary programmes. One can conceive of a time when a foolish monarch and foolish court advisers might make the question a practical one by interfering in poli- tics as the House of Lords recently did when it rejected a Budget. In such a case, the So- cialist movement would be bound to stand for democratic control, and it would strive for root and branch changes. But from the purely practical point of view, Socialism, as is shown by the writings of many of its most distinguished exponents, of whom I may mention Lassalle, does not consider republicanism of essential importance. Theoretically it would say that a republic is a more intellectually defensible sys- tem of government than any other, and there it would leave the matter for the folly of other people to make it of practical moment. Socialism declares for the sovereignty being in the hands of the people; it is opposed to property being the qualification for voting; it rejects all fancy franchises and all fancy checks, not one of which, according to the experience of the world, has ever worked; it bases the right to vote on the experience that men have had living under the state which they control; it therefore stands for the widest possible suffrage. Nor does it consider that men alone should vote. So soon as the state begins to act closely with the individual and to concern itself with wages, labour conditions, public morals, chil- dren, the experience of women must guide it as much as the experience of men. A mascu- 152 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT line state can never fulfil the functions of a Socialist state. At a time when the common people as elec- tors were suspected and, if tolerated, certainly not welcomed, caution spun out fine theories about checks and counter-balances. There was to be some authority in the constitution, wise and impartial, conservative but not opposed to change, a break but not a spoke in the wheel, and it was to protect the nation from revolu- tion and spoliation, from demagogues and scratch majorities. This authority was to con- sist of representatives of a section of the com- munity and was either to be recruited by birth, or by people chosen from property voters, or from large constituencies which could be fought only by those possessed of much means. Later on, this theory was supplemented by another. The lower house was not always truly repre- sentative. It was elected on complicated issues, its constituencies were of unequal sizes, by the efflux of time it drifted away from its mandates. Some authority had to be created which would judge when the democratic house was acting Bfl a representative, and when as an autocratic, body. The politics of Socialism have been con- structed on a different plan. They offer no abject allegiance to representative government though they assume that in every state of con- siderable area and population the representative must be the legislator. The representative, however, needs to be checked, but the Socialist proposes to do that by the people themselves and not by a particular section of the people. DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM 153 Hence, the referendum and proportional repre- sentation present themselves to the Socialist in alluring garments, and undoubtedly in countries suffering from corrupt legislators and from gross injustice from an inequality of constituencies, these proposals may be entitled to the term " reforms." In our country, however, that name cannot be given to them. The former is but a clumsy and ineffective weapon which the reaction can always use more effectively than the democracy, because it, being only the power to say "No," is far more useful to the few than to the many, and that will be more and more the case as the many become enlightened. The other adds greatly to the expense of elections, offers increased opportunities for the manipu- lating caucus managers, makes majorities and governments more dependent upon stray odd men in the legislature, and returns to Parlia- ment a greater number of men than are there now whose votes represent no opinion and carry out no mandate, because so many will be re- turned on single issues — e. g. Temperance — but will have to vote on every question that comes before Parliament. The Socialist knows that democracy in government can be secured only bp an efficiently working machine and not by an elaborate set of paper perfections of beautiful but intangible delicacy. Shorter parliaments, payment of members, adult suffrage, is the Socialist machinery of democracy, whilst for further checks and safe- guards resource can be had to one thing and one thing only, a higher political intelligence on the part of the majority of the electors. 154 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 2. Palliatives. From the Socialist standpoint, Democracy is both an end in itself and a means to other ends, for, whilst the Socialist regards the Democratic state as the proof and pledge of completed citizenship, he regards political power as the means of social reconstruction and betterment. He therefore supplements his political pro- gramme by a social one, and this consists of two main sections. He proposes a series of measures to mitigate present conditions, and another series as the first gatherings in of rip- ened Socialist opinion. In the first section are proposals dealing with factory and mine regulation and inspection, the feeding of school children, old age pensions. Some of these he defends on principle, and they will be carried on into the Socialist state. Fac- tories will be inspected to reduce accident risks under Socialism just as under commercialism, under Socialism injured workmen will be com- pensated, and workmen temporarily displaced or idle from no fault of their own will be insured against loss when Socialism has come in its fulness. The casualties and other accidents which beset the path of the workman are a fair charge upon industry. They are as much legitimate costs upon production as are the mending and renewal of machinery. Any other view is unthinkable to the Socialist. Industry must be carried on and its breakdowns must be provided for, and surely there is no more pressing — though to-day no more neglected — DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM 155 responsibility lying at its door than the proper care of the men and women who are the victims of its uncertainties and its dangers. The whole of this part of the Socialist programme, there- fore, is aimed at securing that the human fac- tors in industry are as carefully tended, and as jealously kept from deteriorating as machines and factory walls are now. When the com- munity owns the machines it will not regard them as of greater value than the people who work them, for it will be as interested in human efficiency as capitalists are now interested in mechanical efficiency. A part of this programme, however, will be dropped when Socialism is attained. It is purely protective against conditions which the Socialist is determined to remove. The feeding of needy children is a case in point. Under Socialism, family income will be equal to family requirements. It is far short of that to-day, and therefore if children are to be nourished, if they are to be kept out of the gutter, if they are to have the moral as well as the physical pleasure of a good meal served under proper conditions, the state must step in and do what the parents cannot now do. There is the grav- est risk attending this kind of legislation, and only the most dire necessity can justify it. But when one sees the prodigal waste of child life, the reckless lowering of mental standards and physical fitness, the criminal destruction of good taste and manners which shadow our present failure to keep the family intact, one has to recognise that steps must be taken imme- diately to stop this deterioration whilst its lo6 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT cause is being dealt with by action which takes longer to complete and which produces results in a provokingly slow way. Some of the critics of Socialism seem to assume that So ilists alone commit themselves to this kind of ;;clion. But that is not. so. All other parties do the same kind of thing. The So- cialist, however, never Loses sight of the com- pleted work and it- results. For instance, some people tell us that, we inn^t have religious edu- cation taught with the multiplication table and Latin in our school-, as if such education could be of the least value to any one. Their excuse i> that if it is not taught there it will be taught. nowhere else. The Socialist knows, however, that it cannot be taught there at all, and that the attempt to substitute the schoolmaster for the mother, and the school desk for the fireside, is fatal to both religion and the child. So with divorce. As I am writing this book, a committee of worthy persons is sitting considering with the help of ■ great variety <>f witnesses whether the curse of unhappy wedded life can be miti- gated by the other curse of easy divorce. The Socialist is like a man in a tangled wood, having to turn now to the right, now to the left, and even occasionally to turn back upon his steps, but guided all the time by a compass and a general map of the country he is traversing. The others are like the same man similarly beset, but without compass or map. DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM 157 3. Constructive Legislation. Finally, there is the constructive section of the programme — the section which lays the rounds of well -trimmed and prepared stones on the permanent Socialist fabric. Municipal- tsation and nationalisation in every shape and form, from milk supplies to telephones, are included in this section. But even here, the reader must be warned, the full intention of Socialism cannot yet be carried out. State capitalism is no more Socialism than is peasant proprietorship secured by public credit land nationalisation. The state can be as bad an employer a^ any joint stock company. It can exploit one class of users and consumers to bene- fit the class of tax and rate payers, just as effec- tively and objectionably as a limited liability company can exploit consumers to put profits in the pockets of its shareholders. The Social- ist therefore constantly strives to make the state a model employer, to get it to work co- operatively with its employees, and associate the latter with its management; and as a corol- lary to this he tries to make the state as a cus- tomer of the private employer patronise only those firms which, as far as is possbile to-day, do their duty fairly by their workpeople. That is why municipally and nationally Socialism has been as closely associated with the demands for the insertion in public contracts of clauses providing for fair wages and conditions of labour as with demands for public ownership. Who- ever desires to understand the purport of So- 158 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT cialism must not dissociate these two forms of Socialist activity. But there is another highway to Socialism along which we arc treading. The facilities which the present system of property owning gives to certain individuals to exploit the public must be the subject of legislation. The need for an ever-increasing public income makes this a pressing question for all parties, and the Socialist's system of economic justice and effi- ciency makes it a peculiarly important one for him. No section of the Socialist programme will repay careful study so much as that which deals with finance. By opponents it is de- scribed as confiscation, by himself it is regarded as the means of stopping confiscation; they regard it as a method of impoverishment, he as a means of enrichment; they think of it as raids upon private property, he defends it as a way to secure private property. The dif- ference dividing the two lies in the fact that they assume that whatever is held, is justly held; he contends that there ought to be some title in moral right to all property. Arising out of this challenge to produce a good title, the Socialist classifies incomes into earned and unearned. The division is rough, but no rougher than the division of life into animal and vege- table, and it is sufficiently accurate to bear practical application. With that idea in mind, the Socialist starts upon his financial programme making. The type of unearned income is rent. 1 The 1 Some of our critics keep dinning it into our ears that rent often includes interest when landowners have spent DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM 159 Socialist therefore proposes to tax it, and when he is told that by doing so he is differentiat- ing one kind of property from another, he replies that it is so, the reason being that land is differentiated from every other kind of prop- erty by its" own nature. The aim of this tax is to secure the economic rent for the state, because it is the state that creates the value which economic rent represents. When the tax upon economic rent becomes substantial, the monopoly character of land will be de- stroyed, and it will be free for more general use than at present. Large estates will be broken up and more people will live upon the soil. Two problems will face the state in the transi- tion stage. It must remember that economic rent has become private property with the state's consent, and it therefore must agree that it has obligations to the owners. It must also guard against the multiplication of owners, because the creation of small holdings from big estates will increase economic rent, and will therefore increase the difficulties of the state in securing that rent if the class interested in exploitation by rent becomes larger. But there are unearned incomes drawn from other sources than from rents. In time these sources may be classified and scales of taxation arranged to suit them. But for the time being that is unnecessary because, roughly, we can take it for granted that large incomes are less capital in developing their lands. The Socialist, however, does not forget that at all, and when he theorises about rent, he means real rent, and not rent plus interest. 160 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT and less earned in their final increments, so that a scheme of graduated income-tax may be assumed to trap those portions of national income which illegitimately find their way into private pockets. The effect of this system of finance is three- fold. It will tap sources of national income which will yield ever-swelling volumes of supply; it will destroy the value of monopolies to indi- vidual owners and thus stop existing opportu- nities of exploitation; it will lighten the bur- dens borne by industrial capital and thus enable trade to expand and prices to fall. The cost of government will be borne mainly by public income and not by taxes paid from private income, so that industry will not feel it, .and proceeding along with this will be a steady extension of municipalisation and nationalisa- tion made practical by the destruction of mo- nopoly and by the expansiveness of national financial resources. Only one incident in this transition need be discussed specially. The Socialist denies that he proposes a policy of confiscation. Is he not, however, to confiscate as a matter of fact? The state did not confiscate when the tele- graphs were nationalised, nor does it propose to confiscate the telephone service in a few months from now. Switzerland did not con- fiscate the railways when it nationalised them. Neither Glasgow nor London confiscated their trams when they municipalised them. If there has been a shadow of confiscation in any of these transfers the taxpayers and ratepayers were the victims, not the shareholders. DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM 161 I shall show presently that Socialism cannot come by confiscation, but before doing so I desire to point out that, if it could, the eco- nomic history of the past would be very awk- ward for 'those who might complain. The expropriation of the monasteries upon which were founded the fortunes of some of our most respectable families, the wholesale enclosure of commons and public lands, the brutal compe- tition, which was really not competition at all but industrial murder, by which the fortunes of some of our trust magnates have been se- cured, form an awkward record for the classes moralising about expropriation. And if it be argued, as it generally is, that these things were done only that lands might be used for the national good and that economic resources might not go to waste, the Socialist's answer is both swift and decisive. That is just his aim and his justification. What is done in the green tree can surely be done in the dry. But history, though an awkward record of preda- tory acts for some classes, is a bad precedent in this respect for Socialists. The interests of classes are so mixed up, the generous sentiments of the masses are so strong, the sanction which the community has given to its own exploitation has been so definite, that it would not be politic, and it certainly would not be just, to pursue any policy of con- fiscation. Socialists have not proposed to do bo. "We do not consider," wrote Engels in 1894. l "the indemnification of the owners as 1 Quoted by Vandervelde in Collectivism and Industrial Evolution, p. 186. 162 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT an impossibility, whatever be the circumstances. How many times has not Karl Marx expressed to me the opinion that if we could buy up the whole gang, it would even be the means of getting rid of them most cheaply." The substitution of public for private owner- ship will not come in a day, nor will it affect everything at once. That is tantamount to saying that it will come in different ways. Railways have been purchased, rival milk sup- plies have been provided as new businesses, proposals have been made to take land for use and regard the landowners as dowagers. 1 Thus we have already experienced purchase, competition, expropriation with guarantee of in- come (and if we add the case of the Suez Canal, the acquiring of national interests in under- takings) as steps to public ownership, and as time goes on other methods appropriate to circumstances will be adopted. When the state is in a better position than it is now to absorb industry, it will extend the principle of the Development Commission and the Congested Districts Boards of Ireland and Scotland, and these Boards will then act for the development of state enterprise, and not merely to spur on, to enlighten and to guide private enterprise. In fact, upon this, which may be granted to be the most difficult part of the Socialist evo- lution to forecast with any certainty, numerous public activities are beginning to throw a light. What is quite certain is that the state will adopt different methods of acquiring control of indus- i Scottish Land Bill. DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM 163 trial capital, but that none of them — unless a catastrophe were to be precipitated by the reaction — can be called confiscation with any justice. 4. Right to Work. The political demands of Socialism cannot be understood better than by a study of the "Right to Work." The demand has a long and a rich history in the course of which political theory, Socialist points of view, and historical events would have to be reviewed. Had Anton Menger lived, he might have written that history. In a short section of a book like this, I can hardly do justice even to a summary of it. Curiously enough, in the first instance, tlie doctrine was a philosophic tenet of the eighteenth-century individualists — though the phrase itself appears to have been used first of all by Fourier, when he was discussing other rights than the political ones which were proclaimed during the Revo- lution. It was held to be inseparable from in- dividuality. If a man had a right to life, the individualist argument ran, the state had to see that he had physical sustenance. If he could not work some poor law organisation had to take him in hand; if he could work but had no opportunity given him to work, under any state which was not communist that right of his took the form of a claim upon the state to find something for him to do by which to earn an income. In one form or another that received the support of Locke, of Montesquieu, of Rousseau and the whole of their school. 1G4 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT But the baffling entanglements in which com- mercialism enveloped the right, led to the indi- vidualists dropping it. It became ■ mere dream to them, and the fact that the Socialists stuck to it is only one of many proofs which show that, so far from being an ant i-individualist philosophy. Socialism contains all the essentials of real individualism. It eszrased considerable influence upon Socialist thought in the 'forties, and, ai every one knows, the Revolution of lNl-s led to the founding of the National Work- shops of Paris. I am not to expose the already oft-exposed error of attributing the failure of these workshops to Louis Blanc and his Social- ist friends. It is true that the Socialists made the opening of the workshops imperative, l»ut the Minister responsible for them deliberately designed their collapse because he was a bitter opponent of Louis Blanc. Mr. Kirkup. one of the most impartial and painstaking of inquirers, wrote: "It is perfectly clear that the national workshops were simply a travesty of the pro- posala of Louis Blanc, established expressly to discredit them"; 1 and it was regarding the tales spread about them that Lassalle exclaimed: "Lying is a Luropcan power." Louis Blanc repudiated them. There arc some events in history about which popular opinion comes to a conclusion, wrong as wrong can he, hut the opinion is circulated, is reiterated, is persisted in until it becomes an unquestioned assump- tion, and it can he removed after that only by the most patient and laborious campaign of — 1 History of Socialism, pp. 48, 49. DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM 165 telling the truth. Such an event is the failure of the National Workshops of Paris. The French Socialist movement had to bow to the opposition of popular ignorance and become silent on the Right to Work for a long time. k A similar untoward fate befell it in Germany. The Liberal individualists there adopted it as a cardinal article of their faith. In the Prus- sian Civil Code of the 6th of February, 1794, it was embodied, but in administration it proved to be but a constitutional provision for poor law relief. The English workhouse and stone- yard were what the Prussian Liberals meant when they recognised the Right to Work. Further, when Bismarck was piloting his anti- Socialist legislation through the Reichstag in 1884, he declared that a recognition of the Right to Work was necessary as a part of the programme by which he was to kill the menace of Socialism by kindness. The Liberals had then abandoned the principles of individualism and were standing by those of wage slavery, and attacked Bismarck for his declaration. In reply to their leader. Richter, he said cate- gorically: "I recognize unconditionally a right to labour." Hence, used as it has been in Germany, as a mere poor law claim, it has not only disappeared from the demands of the German Social Democrats, but has been op- posed by them at International Congresses. In this country, however, it has been revived in its true significance and is put forward more frequently than any single demand in the So- cialist programme. The reasons are obvious, and a narration of 16G THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT them will throw further light upon Socialist methods and purposes. The Socialist revives the classical individu- alist claim that unless a man can find the means of life all theories about his liberty are but unreal shadows, ami the duty imposed upon him to preserve his life cannot be borne by him. In society the right to work cannot be made effective ezcepl by the state. A man cannot jn> to any single employer and say: "I demand employment"; but he may justly go to the state and -ay: "I have tried everything I can think of but I can find no work. I present my claim either to be put to work or to receive subsistence." That is the foundation of the Righl to Work Bill for which the British Labour Party is responsible. The subsistence provision can be secured in one of two ways. It may be provided on the communist plan of allowing the unemployed man to share in the national wealth by giving him grants during his period of unemployment, but that is nut Socialism, ami the Sot will not willingly adopt that proposal. It may also be provided by a scheme of insurance, the pre- miums of which an- provided by the state, the trade, and the body of workmen. That is much nearer to the general principles of Social- ism, and in that form this part of the Right to Work claim is now being advocated and en- forced by the Socialist parties of the world. The other part of the claim is, however, from the point of view of Socialist reconstruction more important. It assumes that it is the duty of the state to organise labour. The first DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM 167 step in this is the establishment of the Labour Exchange, the second the decasualisation of labour by the prohibition of the engagement of casual workers except through exchanges. The effect of this will be to increase the number of chronically unemployed men, for which the state must assume responsibility. The state with this responsibility upon its shoulders must turn at once to an examination of its own resources to see how they can be used better than they are. For it is obvious that putting these unemployed men to work in industries already fully manned or over- manned would solve nothing and perhaps would increase misery. The problem which the Labour Party desires the state to face is therefore that of the development of its unused resources. We must be quite clear upon this point, because it is the essential part of the Labour Party's purpose. Neither relief works nor the National Workshops of 1848 (except for training, perhaps) are asked for, but a policy of national develop- ment. So soon as this policy is considered, the ques- tion of the land will inevitably come up, and means will be taken to put it to better use than at present. The Congested Districts Boards of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, the Devel- opment Commission established in 1910, the land legislation of Australia, all point the way to the statesman who will have the foresight, the courage and the patriotism to handle this question. As part of this programme, the Socialist has long been crying for afforestation, national drainage and reclamation, labour farm 168 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT colonies and rural housing with small holdings, and the pressure of social misery and depopu- lation has at length come to his aid. Once more he has proved himself pre-eminently entitled to that adjective "practical" of which his opponents appear to be so desirous to deprive him. He is anxious to secure one condition, however, which the shortsighted statesmen who adopt bis proposals when circumstances compel them, do not see to be necessary. Every activity in this direction, the Socialist urges, should lea 1 toward^ nationalisation. The public ought to retain the ownership of what it has created. The afforestation encouraged should be national and municipal afforestation, the reclaimed land should remain national property, the small holdings should not be freeholds but leaseholds with the necessary security of tenure for those who work them. This is not only required so as to fit in with the general plan of Socialist organisation, but in order to produce the prac- tical result- aimed at. I need only instance the Australian experience regarding land. Sev- eral States broke up large territorial owner- ships and granted freeholds to smaller culti- vators. In a very short time failure began to be written over the experiment. The small holdings were sold and the law of concentration set to work to defeat the shortsighted schemes of governments. The Governments then adopted the Socialist method and retained the freeholds in their own hands. The result came almost instantaneously. The real worker settled on the land because he was not burdened at the V DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM 169 outset by purchase capital, the small holdings did not concentrate into large ones, the people stayed upon the soil. The policy of breaking up the large estates was justified and the sup- port of public funds required for the purpose really resulted in an increased country popu- lation. Thus, worked out into its consequences and translated into a social policy and programme, the Right to Work illustrates in a definite and practical form the intention and meaning of the Socialist's immediate demands. CHAPTER IX IN THE SOCIALIST STATE Some of the critics of Socialism insist that its advocates should not only supply every detail i:i its working, but even the most minute particulars <>f these details. There is a certain ephemera] controversial advantage in this. One of Uk* greatest difficulties which the propa- ganda of Socialism has to encounter is the in- capacity of people to imagine any different state of society to that in which they live. A new social relationship, a new combination of human motives, a new mode of wealth production, is at once set aside as something beyond their vision, and consequently something that bears the stamp of the impractical. Their considera- tion of Socialism therefore ends where it began. The Utopian Socialist had to produce these details because his New Harmony was sup- posed to work straight away like a patented invention. Also, if the modern Socialist pro- posed to adopt revolution as the means to his end, he would require to produce his whole plan, because it would be required on the mor- row of the upheaval. That, however, is not Ins method. He approaches Socialism as Hanni- bal crossed the Alps, and all he has to prove is 170 IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 171 that his theory is rational, that it is justified by modern tendencies which have not yet worked themselves out, that its criticisms on the exist- ing condition of things are accurate and open out a practical way of social development. He can quite properly argue that the details must be settled by experience — the experimental method — and that it is vain to construct a complete social fabric theoretically, when the various elements which must enter into it will have to be made, tested and valued by the knowledge that will be gained whilst it is being built. There are certain general considerations re- garding these details which, however, may be profitably discussed with a view to ascertaining whether there are any fundamental grounds for the conclusion that the Socialist state must remain for ever a mere figment of the senti- mental imagination. 1. Ability. Let us consider first of all the objection that under Socialism the mechanism of production must remain fixed, that invention will be im- possible, and that labour will not be put to more and more efficient use. With this point in mind, Mr. Mallock — to whom I must refer somewhat frequently in this chapter, because he is the only writer in this country who has undertaken a systematic examination of Socialism that is worthy of serious consideration — in an unguarded out- 172 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT burst of grandiloquence has declared: "Socialism has never inaugurated an improved chemi- cal process." x He might as well have pro- claimed that the Binomial Theorem has never woven a nightcap nor patched a pair of dilapi- dated trousers. I know a Socialist who has "inaugurated an improved chemical process"; and I know another who, by the discovery of radium, lias opened out the way for a revision of our physical theorising; I know a third who shares with Darwin the honour of having es- tablished the greatest scientific generalisation of the century, and of having revolutionised every department of thought in consequence. But that is not the question. It is: Can Socialism guarantee the conditions under which improved chemieal processes will be inaugu- rated? If it can, we may think more about it; if it cannot, we may dismiss it altogether from our minds, and pay attention to Mr. Malloek's amusing theories about Ability and Aristocracy. Every system of production must bear the cost of its own improvement. A recognition of this has been the secret of German business success. We got our markets under the favour- able smiles of our political conditions; we have lost many of them because we were not pre- pared to pay for the brains of discoverers and inventors, and this was necessary to enable us to keep our customers. America got its markets because the forceful wills of its people enabled them to take the fullest and the most brutal advantage of the economic laws of con- 1 A Critical Examination of Socialism, p. 4. IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 173 centration of capital and management. Ger- many got its markets because it established scientific laboratories and linked them up with industrial processes. Now, under Socialism, our educational insti- tutions would be revolutionised. Science would be our guide in everything. Even to-day, thanks mainly to the state or to public cor- porations working with the aid and the mind of the state, this change is beginning. Agri- cultural, technical, industrial laboratories are being opened. Universities are running experi- mental farms, are testing seeds, manures, soils, are advising farmers about crops, stock, diseases, dairy products, and everything else that concerns them; they are establishing industrial laboratories where post-graduate stu- dents may work not only on experiments relat- ing to pure science, but on those relating to applied science; town councils and county councils are aiding the work and are supple- menting it by independent efforts of their own. All these activities have been hampered and delayed in this country, in the first place, owing to the blindness and lack of education amongst our "captains of industry," who have followed the profit-making ideals of commercialism only too closely, and, in the second place, owing to our mistrust of state action making us look in other directions for our aid, and also making that state action inefficient and inadequate when it was at last begun. It must not be overlooked that it is in Germany where the grip of commercialism has been least deadening, because it has been modified by other national 174 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT impulses, and where the activities of the state have been greatest, that this development of scientific investigation is most marked and has yielded the best results. I can imagine that under Socialism every centre of higher and scientific education will have its applied departments and laboratories, every industry and group of industries will have their staff of scientific and technical experts, whilst the skill of the workmen in every factory and workshop, and their mental keenness will have been brought to a pitch of excellence which is hardly reached by our most expert workmen to-day. This is the foundation, this is the atmos- phere, of all improvements in industrial pro- cess* a. But the critic again appears with an objection. The Socialist cannot find managers of ability. Mr. Mallock writes a great deal about this, and though he does his best, by neglecting to represent Socialist methods with accuracy, to reason out his conclusion, he really fails, and in the end he simply jumps to it. 1 I propose to discuss it, however. Whatever may be our conclusions regarding the reward which we are to give to ability, the Socialist system of education, the Socialist organisation of scientific laboratory and work- shop, and the Socialist care to provide equality of opportunity will, unless nature herself fail 1 A Critical Examination of Socialism, chap. vii. Especi- ally the shipyard illustration, p. 77, where imaginary diffi- culties are gratuitously assumed and the most incompetent actions on the part of the authorities coolly taken for granted. IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 175 us, train our brains and produce the ability which is to be rewarded. Our critics are par- ticularly fond of using the argument that such and such a, thing is unthinkable and is contrary to human nature, and that argument has to be used by us here. For what we are told by our critics to assume is, that there will be a great production of ability and a provision of the richest opportunitues for it to show itself, but that it will yield no results. The demand to believe such a thing is palpably absurd. The intellectual and scientific atmosphere of the Socialist state will be pregnant with discovery, invention, and improvement; ability will be so general that it will not be confined to one class or to one type of mind, and it will therefore be available to all kinds of prompting from mone- tary award to public honour. To-day, let us assume (though the assumption is not just) that it can be had only at a high monetary price. Under Socialism it will belong to so many that it will exert itself sometimes from the sheer love of exercising itself, sometimes for honours, sometimes for money perhaps; but in any event that it should exist and do nothing is as unthinkable as that the sun should shine without emitting light and heat. There will be places in laboratories, places in work- shops, places in the public administrative ser- vices, open for it and demanding to be filled. Skill can act as teacher, as experimenter, as foreman, as manager, as director, for industry under Socialism will be carried on by the same differentiation of function as is the case now. Therefore we can safely conclude that there 176 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT will be ability; that its monopoly will be broken down, and that there will be plenty of opportunity for its exercise under Socialism. The precise method of rewarding it can be safely left to experience in the calm assurance that if special monetary payment is necessary, Socialism will adapt itself to that necessity. But, again our critic objects, experience has shown that "public opinion" has been against mechanical invention, and as " public opinion" will control the production of wealth under Socialism, the ability produced in the way described will be as ruthlessly sacrificed as certain primitive peoples sacrificed their female offspring. There will be just enough of it preserved to keep things going. And here they remind us of the wild Luddites, of the tribu- lations of Arkwright with the crowd, and so on, and defy us to get our necks out of that noose. I must, however, point out a distinction between the present state and Socialism which robs these historical instances of any value for the purpose of this argument. The immediate and local effect of the introduction of machinery to-day is to displace labour. Labour saving machinery under the operations of our present system is labour substituting. That was the first effect of the Arkwright inventions. It must not be forgotten that the years when the new machines were being introduced lay in the period when labour sunk to the darkest depths of economic misery. Labour was clutching at straws rather than calmly thinking out a policy of salvation. Moreover, be it not forgotten, IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 177 Adam Smith himself admitted the displace- ment of labour and the change in the kind of labour demanded after the introduction of new- machinery, and so much has this influenced economists .that they have frequently discussed whether men so displaced have a claim for compensation. (Cf. Fox well, Irregularity of Em- ployment.) From this distance we can see and appreciate the after effects of the mechanical inventions, but the weaver who had to compete with them in the middle of the eighteenth century neither Could see nor appreciate. Ned Ludd was not a historian surveying the nineteenth century; he was a workman (or something of the kind) who found that the machines were emptying his cupboard. Such a system as that must inevitably bring "public opinion" into con- flict with mechanical invention. But that is not the Socialist system. When we have public ownership of the machines, they will be labour saving immediately and not in the long run, and the interest of the working population to maintain an income and keep it as big as possible, will welcome mechani- cal improvements under Socialism as heartily as it opposed them under capitalism. A man working with his own machinery is glad to be told of methods to economise his labour; men working with other people's machinery regard such methods as a notice for some of them to begin walking the streets. Historical refer- ences must be used with some discrimination. Now I can complete my argument. Under Socialism there will be more ability, there will 178 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT be more opportunities for its exercise, and a heartier welcome will be given to its results than under the present system. The mechanism of production will not stand still, but will steadily improve under Socialism. Production will be cheapened. There will be a larger volume of national wealth to enjoy; labour will be more efficiently directed and be more productive; non-producers will be reduced to a minimum; and the common incentive to which every one will respond will be the steady reduction of the necessary drudgery labour, so that the free time during which a man's will has full play may be as ample as possible. All that means industrial progress. 2. Artistic Genius. I now come to another department of the same survey. The arts will die, it is said, when Socialism conies, because there will be no intellectual freedom under this "coming tyranny," and no encouragement to the imagi- nation under this "reign of materialism." This objection approaches as nearly to the unthink- able as it can do. That, in a community or- ganised industrially as I have just described, the mind of man must become servile and dull is impossible. Surely, rather, as there is to be ability, leisure and a generally diffused enjoy- ment of private property and leisure, a great impetus will be given to all intellectual pur- suits, to culture, to every activity of the free mind, and the grandeur of public buildings and the richness of public treasures which will V IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 179 then embody the dignity of the communal life, will augment that impetus. The crushing misery of the slum as a home and the street as a playground, the deadening dulness of the respectable quarters of our towns, where our middle classes strive in vain to breathe the atmosphere of culture, will have gone, and openness, variety, taste, freshness will have taken their place. The individual himself, the community of which he is a part, the surround- ings in which he lives, will be charged with mental invigoration. What is called the "reign of materialism" will be the very opposite of that. But the critic smiles, "I know the Socialist is at home in speculative Sociology; come and tell me in practice how this can work." l In response I propose to take two points, one which justifies me in my belief that the intel- lectual life is possible to the great majority of people, and the other, which justifies me in setting aside the "practical" arguments of our opponents as being of no substantial value in this connection. My belief in the possibility of an intellectual life for those who do the hardest labour has been greatly strengthened in recent years by my contact with the Adult School and similar movements. To find, Sunday morning after 1 This is a favourite corner into which our critics run. They favour it because whilst in it they can make all kinds of unwarranted assumptions whilst they pose as practical business men. The student can find illustrations of this in nearly every chapter of A Critical Examination of Socialism. The point is stated categorically at p. 101. 180 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT Sunday morning, crowds of men who have been working laboriously for long hours in fac- tories at exhausting drudgery all through the week, appearing carefully dressed at hours when most people in better circumstances are only getting up or have got no further than the commencement of breakfast, and to observe the intellectual keenness which these men show for subjects of serious import, compel one to think on somewhat Utopian lines of what might be under better circumstances. And when, in addition to that, one also discovers that these factory workers are tenants of some near-by allotment, where they grow excellent kitchen produce and cultivate beautiful flowers for the esthetic enjoyment of the work, one's optimism for the future is increased, and one's assurance that an intellectual response will be made to the changes which Socialism proposes becomes fixed on a rock. I now come to my matter of practical detail. If there is any citizen of the Socialist state who has drawn out the sympathies of the whole body of Socialist critics more than any other, it is the poet. His case seems to have weighed on the minds of most of our critics. How is he to be discovered? How is he to be pub- lished? How is he to make a living? The press is to be in the hands of the state. Manu- scripts must be read by a state official with, perhaps, less taste than one of our own poets laureate or our censor of plays. Books will not be allowed to bear royalties. This net of posers is thrown over the head of the Socialist with all the dexterity shown by a retiarius in IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 181 a Roman gladiatorial show. Is the Socialist enmeshed? Let us see. Some honest work has never been bad for the good . poet. Indeed, when our industrial towns were "nests of singing birds," as some of them have been before commercialism trans- formed craftsmanship into toil, the industrial experience of the poet added strength to the wings of his song. 1 The democratic poets have become mute because the darkness of commer- cialism has settled on their souls. The work which the poet will have to do under Socialism will be congenial, for it will be provided auto- matically by the organisation which provides equality of opportunity, and it will therefore not hamper his muse. So Socialism will have its poets. How will they publish? This is one of the questions which can be satisfactorily answered only by time. That they must publish is quite apparent, and it is simply perversity for any one to argue seriously that such an insignifi- cant problem as that will baffle society. But let me try to construct a little bit of Socialist society by using the past as an indication of the future. When time went more leisurely than it does and the hustle and bustle of com- mercialism had not struck us like a cyclone, people lived a pretty full intellectual life in societies like the famous Edinburgh Select Society or in those mournful gatherings of 1 The great outburst of lyrical song in Scotland, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, was purely democratic; and was greatly enriched by the fact that the singers were ploughmen, weavers, shjemakers and such-like. 182 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT cronies which fill so much of the canvas of the life of Burns. There seems little doubt but that if we could possess ourselves once more of our lost leisure (say, by subordinating ma- chines to men instead of men to machines) these circles and coteries would revive, for man's intellectual life is as social in its require- ments BS his industrial life. If they did revive general culture would leap forward with a bound. One of the reasons why an unworthy literature is finding such a market to-day is that the destruction of intellectual coteries lias with- drawn the great pari »>l' the intellectual stimulus which the best of men require. Individualism in reading and thinking gives, fir^t, trashy journalism, and then trashy literature, a chance. Well, under the conditions which would come with Socialism, Science, Art, Literature would have their associations everywhere. This is tin- audience for our poet. He delights and charms his friends. He appears before the connoisseurs as Burns did in Edinburgh, or before the socially select as Tennyson did, or before the public as Dickens, or Carlyle, or Thackeray did. Thus the poet gets his repu- tation. But he has yet to find a printing- press and a publisher, and the Socialist state owns the one and is the other, we are told! The Socialist state, however, is only an instrument of public opinion, and I have a firm conviction that the divine poet, or any other kind of poet, would have no more diffi- culty with a literary faculty of the Socialist state than with the reader of a London pub- lisher. Still, I shall not leave it at that, because IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 183 I desire to show in a greater fulness the elas- ticity of the Socialist state. I return to the literary coterie which first encouraged and applauded. the genius. Where men have leisure, culture and means, the literary output is great, and the most natu- ral thing in the world for those coteries to do would be to publish. They would take the place of the ancient patron; they will do the publishing — just as the Royal Society to-day publishes monographs, or the Early English Text Society or the New Spalding Club issues historical records. Not only that, for I can easily imagine that these societies will have control of presses. I do not say that will be so, but I do say that if it were so the poet would have a much better chance of publication than he has now, and also that such a thing would not be inconsistent with Socialist theory and requirements. Then the market! If a better distribution of wealth would turn the imperfectly clad millions of backs into a field for the employment of British labour as the prairie-land of Canada is made a field for British capital, what a fruit- ful soil for British art would be the British home. To-day the patronage of art belongs to a small class; under Socialism it would belong to the whole people. On this wide field all art would flourish. To-day the patrons are so few that the original genius has a bitter struggle. It will not tread upon worn ways, and its feet are pierced with briars. It gets soured; it declares war; it becomes ugly with the pain at its heart. Under Socialism and 184 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT with the opportunities which a vast patron- age affords, it will remain natural and sweet. Nothing is more certain than that the advance of Socialism will be heralded by an invigora- tion of the aesthetic tastes. Still, there is the remuneration to be settled. I was never able to see the alleged difficulties about this until I read Mr. Mallock's proof of its impossibility. The value of a book, he says, as determined by Socialist economics is its cost of selling up and binding, and conse- quently, according to that economics, if Dickens made a living off his books it was "by rob- bing his compositors." l If the working of a Socialist state is examined by a mind so blind as to facts, and so confused as to economic reasoning, one can see how these mysterious difficulties arise. The argument used above is this. The value of a knife is the cost of labour of the knife grimier and hi^ assistants; if the iron ore quarrymail and the smelter make any- thing out of it, it is "by robbing the knife- grinder." A book consists of two things. It is the physical thing produced by binding up printed sheets; it is also the intellectual thing of ideas, of art, of information, or the like. Its cost must cover the purchase of both. Mr. Mallock gets into his bog of difficulties by forgetting what a book is, not by applying a critical mind to the Socialist state. Now, the payment for the second aspect of a book can be determined in a variety of ways. The writer could be put on a civil list, he could be 1 A Critical Examination of Socialism, p. 53. V IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 185 subsidised by his patron coterie — but this is the point, there is nothing in Socialist theory- preventing his being rewarded in the simplest of all fashions, from the sales of his book. If the cost of composing and otherwise producing and publishing the book is x and it is sold at x + y to cover remuneration for the author, I have yet to learn that such a transaction vio- lates any canon of Socialist economics. So, under Socialism, we may have the poet, and he may have his public, his publisher and his remuneration. And I have taken the poet to represent the intellectual worker of every kind who would be treated mutatis mutandis in a similar way. There is not much fear of intellectual stag- nation in the Socialist state. 3. Minority Rights. The difficulty of the poet is generally but a preliminary to what is meant to be the still greater difficulty of an opposition between the powers that be and the critical newspaper, which must lead to the suppression of the latter. If Socialism were a divinely ordered society the critical newspaper — especially the daily one — might be suppressed altogether in the intellectual and moral interest of the public, for there is no more melancholy spectacle to-day than the party press, with its misrepresenta- tions, its suppressions, and its tongue in its cheek — unless it be the spectacle of those who read it and believe it. The supposition of our critics is that the 186 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT "powers that be" under Socialism will be all powerful and that, whilst remaining quite sane, they will be oppressively tyrannical. They will stamp out hostile opinion. They will not per- mit a whisper of criticism. They will govern like a South American president with an army at his back, with venial judges on the bench, and with political police in their communes. In other words, they will have forgotten all the world's experience of how to make govern- ments stable, they will have ceased to appre- ciate the safety of free speech and of open criticism, they will have departed from the axiom 1 1 i;it civic peace is maintained by the liberty to discuss and to grumble. One must grant this extraordinary revolution in the art and science of government, this unthinkable loss of capacity cm the part of governors, before one can even conceive the objection with which I am dealing. And be it noted in the passing, when one has granted that, one has destroyed the political conditions of freedom under which alone Socialism can not only exist, but actually come into existence. My answer to the objec- tion, therefore, is that its very conception is inconsistent with the principles of Socialism and, in the light of history, is a palpable absurdity. I am, however, unwilling to part with it at that, because I am again anxious to face the real problems of Socialist administration so far as reason and experience have as yet thrown light upon them, and this objection leads to some important considerations. There will be parties in the Socialist state; there will be V IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 187 governments and oppositions — majorities and minorities. Truth and progress will be then, as they have always been, hammered out by rival tongues and opposing brains. In discussing Socialist administration, the crit- ics of Socialism have always overlooked the large part that voluntary organisations are to play inside the state. For instance, the family will probably enjoy an influence which it could not acquire under commercialism, for under commercialism it has been steadily decaying. 1 The relation between parents and children will be closer, and be continued for longer periods than is now possible, and, consequently, the home will resume its lost religious significance. It will be altar fires that will burn on its hearths, and sacramental meals that will lie on its tables. The free man with leisure will show his social nature not only by living in crowds, but by forming for his own delight groups of men like-minded to himself. One of these voluntary organisations will undoubtedly be a political party, for I cannot conceive of a time when different practical proposals in state- craft will not exist or not be transformed into great rival policies and principles of government The state will have to give these parties free and fair play, because the state will be demo- 1 It is an amusing commentary upon the charge against Socialism that it seeks to abolish marriage, that so soon as there was a Socialist municipal control at Lille it abolished fees for getting married in order that difficulties in regu- lating family connections might be removed. Many people who would not, or could not, pay the old high fees at once presented themselves to be married, and literally blessed "the enemies of the family" for their moral action. 188 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT cratically governed. Each party will have to look after its own interest, and it will, there- fore, be essential that each party has its own organs. To-day, in the Palace of Westminster, the van 9 parties have their own rooms; they are recognised by the Speaker and the other officers of the House of Commons; Hansard reports all speeches impartially. Under Social- ism I can, therefore, easily imagine that the party newspapers would be under party control, parties and groups having certain rights of publication, just as a member of the Amer'can House of Representatives has the right to hand in the manuscript of a speech and get it printed as though he had delivered it. The pre might be under party management with safe- guards, or party rights might consist in a power to claim the use of presses. The point i^ trivial, and if critics busy themselves devising all kinds of possible anomalies and difficulties, all 1 can say is that, if even to-day the country decided to nationalise its printing-presses and to make parties officially responsible for the papers published in their interests, two or three business men connected with party newspapers could draw up within a week a scheme of working which could set the whole plan going, and produce a freer and a more responsible press than we have now. Once we disabuse our minds of the totally erroneous idea that a government's interests lie in suppressing every opinion but its own, every serious obstacle in the way of free political speech and writing under Socialism disappears, and the problem becomes one of IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 189 business arrangement. To-day the syndicated newspaper groups are solving it. The central management from some London office of half- a-dozen papers printed throughout the country, the practice (as every one who gets newspaper cuttings knows) which certain political offices are adopting of sending out special articles, Leaders, comments, and even letters signed by individuals, to scores of different newspapers, which print them as though they were of local origin, are paving the way for responsible control of frankly partisan publications. They are doing more, moreover. They are warning the public that the concentration of capital and the union of the anti-social interests against the common interests, the day is rapidly fading away when every party had a chance of upholding its views through the press. The monopoly of the organs of public opinion, which was long supposed to be inevitable under Socialism, is, as a matter of fact, inevitable under capitalism, and the fading privilege of free discussion will only be restored when economic power is better distributed, or, when concentrated, is democratically controlled. For, it must be observed, the suppression of critical opposition, impossible so far as a government or public authority is concerned, is quite possible when a combination of capitalist interests makes up its mind to effect it. 4. Workshop Management. In order that one may appreciate the position taken up in the last section, it must be under- 190 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT stood quite clearly that the Socialist state is not merely to have a political form. It will not be embodied exclusively in a few politically controlled departments under the shadow of the House of Parliament. It will also consist of an industrial organisation, which will have a very decisive influence on public opinion, and will also act as a check upon the political organisation. At the head of this side of the state will be the ablest business men, economic, scientists, statisticians in the country, all having risen through the lower grades of the particular departments to which they belong. Only some of the means of production will be directly under their charge, like railways and canals. They will be responsible for foreign trade, for general labour legislation, possibly for educa- tion; they will regulate the volume of national production and determine exchange ratios; they will have charge of the finaneial arrangements of the community; they will decide — subject to the assent of the political state — the varying dividing lines between associated and individ- ualist production, for these lines will not be drawn on one day for all time. And if such a scientific control and regulation of production seems strange to minds unfamiliar with the very thought of it, I content myself by remind- ing such readers that before many years have passed over our heads, trusts of various forms will be doing in certain industries practically the same work. In this respect, as in others, we shall grow into the Socialist state. As Socialism is the child of capitalism, capitalism will show it how to set about its business. IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 191 In the industrial state, too, there will be great activity amongst voluntary organisations. The main industrial division under capitalism is between capital and labour — employer and employed. * That is "the class war" now. But there will be wars under Socialism too, the main cleavage then being between consumer and producer. It will be the interest of the whole community minus the producers of each article severally, to get the cost of production reduced to a minimum, and though the better conditions of life and the prevailing atmos- phere of justice will prevent that opposition from developing hostile camps such as we have at present, no harm is done by assuming the worst that can happen. We must put the most severe tests on our faith. We must, therefore, look for a survival of trade unionism in the Socialist state. Those engaged in the different sections of production will have their voluntary organisations, which will very likely be international in their scope. They will, in all probability, be utilised for advisory purposes by the central authorities, and they will be consulted when any change in exchange ratios or in industrial processes is being contemplated. They will also be a convenient medium for those insurances which will be necessary to meet temporary displace- ments of labour and other accidents which must overtake the best organised system of production. Whether these organisations will appoint, or have any voice in appointing, workshop managers and business directors, is a matter 192 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT upon which no definite opinion can as yet be formed. Let us remind ourselves of the system. There is a mass of workmen at the base of the structure, above them is a large army of foremen, over them departmental managers, and over them general workshop directors. Then we come to the organisation of groups of industries and of districts. A graded body of managers will be responsible f<>r that, ending perhaps with a district director. The widest area of all — the national community — will be CO-ordinati'd by the bodies to which I have already referred. If then- i^ anything unfamiliar about all this, I again commend the troubled spirit tn study the organisation of the Railway Clearing Bouse, a trust like the American Steel Corporation, or a German Kartel formed f<»r the purpose of distributing markets and profits. The organisation of the 1 ><-t trade unions, particularly the German organisation, also throws light upon this subject. Then the question which I have already put to myself may be considered: II<>w are all these grades to be fed? The workers will be provided from th<- schools. In the great majority of cases youths have their own bent. The Socialist child must work, and he will, as a rule, choose bis own calling. Should he desire to follow some profession, and there are more applicants than vacancies, a well-devis <\ examination of selected students will provide the desired "equality of opportunity." Should he desire to follow a technical line, the schools will be in the closest touch with the workshops, and the best advice will be given him regarding V IN THE SOCIALIST STATE 193 openings and demand* 1 The coercion about which we hear so much will rarely be expe- rienced, all the more so as a large part of our unpleasant work will have disappeared, owing to mechanical and other invention and discovery. It will certainly be no prominent feature in the Socialist state. What of the selection of managers? Two schools of co-operative thought dispute this point between them, and are experimenting with it, and until the contest and the experi- ments have gone on a little longer we may regard it as unsettled. There is, in the first place, the school which believes in the self governing workshop. It believes that the workpeople should appoint their managers, either directly, or indirectly through some representative committee. The objection to this view is that it regulates production by the producer himself, whereas production should be regulated by the whole community. The argument in favour of it is that it secures just treatment to the producer, and protects him against exploitation. The objection to the other view is that under it the consumer can tyran- nise over the producer, and can deprive him of what is a fair reward for his labour. The productive works of the Co-operative Wholesale Society in England are often charged with this lapse from co-operative grace. In favour of it is the fact that only by such a scheme of man- agement can all the producing functions be put 1 This expedient is being adopted in some schools to-day with satisfactory results. 194 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT upon terms of equality and even-handed justice be done to them. The two schools of co-operative propaganda used to be in pretty sharp conflict with each other, but they are now coming into a more friendly touch, with the result that they are blending together. This is the common history of such rival theories. They unite; one does not crush the other out. Socialist management will be determined by the further experience of co-operation. The directors of areas and the central controlling staff will undoubtedly repre- sent the consuming public; the managers in direct touch with workshop organisation will have to carry the confidence of the workers as well as serve the needs of the consumers. The argument that this double task will produce deadlocks, that it will produce managers incap- able of doing their duty and over-indulgent to the workpeople, is a mere bogey. Problems of precisely this character are now being solved by the co-operative movement, and if they have given this movement some trouble, as they undoubtedly have, we must not forget that the co-operative experience will be handed down, not only as a guide, but as an industrial habit. » CHAPTER X THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT Socialism is a tendency, not a revealed dogma, and therefore it is modified in its forms of expression from generation to generation. The goal remains the same, but the path twists and twines like every other human path. Its wayside aspects also change, and the people who walk upon it do not remain the same. At one time an expanding industry draws men in one direction, as a gold discovery in new lands draws men from old fields of labours and casts a new glamour over men's vision. At another time thought is inspired by some impulse imparted by scientific discovery when every idea which dominates man is moulded by that impulse. At yet another time some outstanding cause becomes the centre of all vital intellec- tual force and every other movement tends to express itself in relation to that cause. Thus we have seen during the past century the magnets round which men's minds have centred change again and again and human interests change with them. Political enfranchisement, 195 196 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT scientific discovery, the accumulation of wealth, religion have dominated thought, and have created philosophies, outlooks, systems of criti- cism, motives. Fluctuations in the Socialist movement and a varying emphasis placed upon aspects of the Socialist creed, have marked these changes as the tides mark the varying course of the moon. 1. Saint-Simon and Fourier. Long before there was what can can be called a Socialist movement, there were men groping after the Socialist plan, examining society with lanterns lit from the lamp of Socialism, making demands which were partial discoveries of Socialism itself, in the same way that many pioneers set foot on America before America itself was explored. The word Socialism itself appears to have been first used in this country in 1835 to describe Owen and his work. It was adopted by the Frenchman Reybaud and applied by him to the theories of Saint-Simon and Fourier. At that time it was used to indicate theories of social reconstruction in which the state had no part — moral and idealistic movements of Utopists; and when Marx and Engels opened a new chapter in the history of the movement by insisting upon the political character of the transformation, they chose the word Com- munist as their title, and, in the famous Com- munist Manifesto, attacked the Socialism of their predecessors. One of the amusing tricks which the whirligig of time has brought, is a THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 197 complete inversion of the application of these terms. 1 The French Revolution not only stirred up into confidence all the optimistic expectation of human nature but taught it to speak, to edu- cate, to agitate. It was springtime on the earth. The people had not experienced them- selves; their friends had not been disillusioned. Years afterwards Owen, so typical of his age, could serenely argue that simple reason would convert kings and that a worthy homily addressed to the angel at the gate of Paradise would induce her to lower her sword. This enthusiastic naivete was also the soul of Saint- Simon who was the first to draw to himself a company that can be called Socialist. These pioneers were queer folk. They were children to the day of their death. The strange being, Saint-Simon, with his valet solemnly wakening him every morning with the salutation: "Re- member, monsieur le comte, that you have great things to do," is separated from us by worlds of feeling. And yet his lack of humour and his crystalline sincerity which made him cheerfully accept the terrible poverty of his later years, endear him to us. In 1817, when he was forty-three years of age, he first wrote on social matters, and for eight years, till his death, he continued to 1 One of the many displays of ignorance which the anti- Socialist organisations have made, is a leaflet which one of them has published showing how Marx attacked "Social- ism" and thereby denounced the errors of his followers! The same mistake has crept into books like Guthrie's Social- ism before the French Revolution. 198 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT sketch out the pathway to human freedom. He had the spirit of organisation in him. He felt that the disintegration of society which followed upon the end of feudalism and marked the beginning of commercialism was ruinous, and his plea was that men of science should manage industry benevolently and wisely in the interests of the whole people. He put the coping-stone on his system by his last work, The New Christianity, in which he laid down the fundamental doctrine of social religion, that humanity is a fraternity and should act as such. On the side of economics he had a very clear vision that accumulated property was being used for exploiting purposes. That was the explanation of poverty, and to put an end to poverty a moral society would bend every energy. This mingling of economics and morals was Saint-Si monian Socialism. The founder had few followers during his lifetime, but he left a school behind him. Like all schools, it evolved and threw out shoots. Comtism was one of its branches, another branch grew out towards modern Socialism. It is this branch which I must trace. Its first-fruits was a community of enthusi- asts, able and well-educated, who lived from a common purse. But it also produced ideas. The idea of association was amplified and enriched at its hands and given an historical setting. Association was shown to be an his- torical tendency which alternated with one in the opposite direction. The reign of anarchy, war, exploitation, had worked itself THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 199 out when it produced the proletariate; the reign of co-operation of organic unity, was about to begin with religion as its inspiration. At the same time the economics of Saint- Simonism were elaborated, and the necessity of the communal control of the instruments of production was proved by a reasoned sequence of argument. Society was to be a differen- tiated organisation in which merit alone was to determine the place of a man, and the value of his services was to determine the character of his reward. But on its mystical side it toppled over as so many fantastic religious movements have done. When men treat the flesh as any- thing but flesh and allow themselves to wander on the bewitched paths of symbolism and mysticism, they are in danger of becoming the slaves of the earthy realities which they think they have dissolved, or of becoming mad; and the blight of both misfortunes ended the school of Saint-Simon. But its healthy tenets never died. They were discussed by bands of men wherever discontent, either intellectual or eco- nomic, agitated Europe. Society kept them in her heart. Saint-Simonism quickened the social movement of the century. Fourier, for instance, wrote before Saint- Simon, but it was Saint-Simonian influence that made Fourierism a living thing. Fourier makes the small commune, which he calls the Phalanstery, the governing unity of his ideal world. He has no fantastic hierarchy of wise men. In that respect he keeps upon solid earth. He was as democratic as Saint-Simon was aristocratic, as decentralising as Saint- 200 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT Simon was centralising. The locality is where wealth is actually created, and there one finds the causes of bad distribution. So Fourier fixed his eye upon the commune. The problem he placed before him was how the mechanical advantages of large industries could be secured without lowering the workmen to the status of a mere machine. With that in view he con- structed, on paper, his Phalanstery. It was to consist of about three hundred families who were to co-operate in production with com- monly owned instruments. Their consumption, however, could be as individualistic as they liked. Policy and economy might induce them to join in the common meal but they were not to be compelled to do so. Machines would lighten toil and not supplant the workman; they would therefore be freely introduced into Phalanstery. Agriculture would be organised so as to fit in with other industry. Both sales and purchases would be made on a large co-opera- tive scale; wealth would be created and dis- tributed with an economy which men had never experienced. Then came the free play of Fourier's imagination. Theatres, temples, gar- dens, galleries, balls, concerts were to bless and enliven the people, and the whole organisa- tion was to be kept harmonious because, in Fourier's view, a free man will do what is rational and harmonious. The Phalanstery was to be the home, not the prison, of human nature. He argued that it must work because it was harmonious. Therefore it failed. Fourier assumed that he himself was the average man, and yet he had abandoned business because he V THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 201 had found it dishonest! He forgot that his father had punished him for telling the truth. At the end of his life he was patiently waiting — he had waited for ten years — convinced that some honest wealthy man would knock at his door and supply him with the money necessary for making his scheme a success. Through such transparent spirits the social doctrines of the French Revolution were focused and the Socialist theory was the result. But Fourier was discussed and found adherents. A sheet was published as his organ and experiments were made with his scheme. In 1837 he died at the age of 65, leaving his strange mixture of innocence and insight, quackery and sagacity, to add its gleams of light to the dawn breaking over Europe. Two plans of association had now been sub- mitted: the centralised aristocracy of Saint- Simon, a feeble child of tottering feudalism and youthful commerce, and the communal self-government of Fourier. Both were fan- tastic; both contained true suggestions and brought out some lines of further advance. Both helped to throw light upon the problems of poverty which were casting menacing shadows over France, and both encouraged the stricken proletariat to agitate, to think, to combine, and to hope. The superficial optimism of the French Revolution passed as a mirage, and the dark and confusing entanglements of democ- racy and commercialism gathered round the workers. But the new propaganda gave them heart. In 1831 the workers of Lyons rose to the cry "Live working or die fighting." As a 202 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT shepherd gathers his sheep from the hills into a banded flock, so the Time Spirit was gather- ing men into a movement. 2. Robert Owen and Chartism. I must turn from France to England. Some of the boldest pioneers of the new movement belonged to this country, for here the evil side of the Industrial Revolution manifested itself earliesl and most dramatically. It was British pamphleteers who examined and explained mosl carefully how the Industrial Revolution led to the impoverishment of the poor and the exploi- tation of the worker. "The right to the whole Produce of Labour" is a characteristically British contribution to Socialist economics. The beginnings of the national movement can be traced back into the eighteenth century through what were mainly political associations meeting in taverns and obscure places. But the British political movement has always had a social purpose more or less clearly within its vision, and the theories of land national- isation and of the bad influence of machinery, published by men like Thomas Spence and championed by his followers, the Spencean Philanthropists, were an early disturbing ele- ment in Radical politics. 1 Robert Owen im- parted both volume and definiteness to the movement. 1 Cf. Harriet Martineau's ill-natured sentence: "The committee of the Spenceans openly meddled with sundry grave questions besides that of a community in land; and amongst other notable projects petitioned Parliament to do away with machinery." — History of the Peace, I, p. 52. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 203 Owen had the same characteristics as Saint- Simon and Fourier, a simple-hearted faith in human perfectability, a transparent honesty of purpose, an absolute blindness to social resistance, an incapacity to appreciate a flaw or a stain in his own system. It was a type of character which could influence only an age before society had been studied scientifically, but which was invaluable for the stirring up of men's hopes and the launching upon the world of new ideas which could gain precision and accuracy as they went along. Be it remembered that in these days Socialism had to be an inspiration, a discovery of the spiritual insight; it could not be a scientific system of criticism, method or construction. The know- ledge to make it such was not then available. The work of Owen is too well known to need more than summary mention here. His birth in 1771, his rapid rise to fortune, his manage- ment of the New Lanark Mills from 1800, his experiments in education, his theories regard- ing the influence of environment on character, his agitation in favour of the state protecting the physically and economically weak by legis- lation, the new chapter in his life which opened in 1817 when he declared in his memorandum to the Parliamentary Committee which con- sidered the Poor Law, that misery was caused by competition between men and machinery and that it could be cured only by the co-op- erative use of the means of production and their subordination to the well-being of the masses, the beginning of his community experiments in 1825, his labour stores with their unique 204 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT methods of exchange, and finally those pathetic closing years unshadowed by a doubt and un- clouded by a thought of failure ending with the appeal to take him home to die where he first saw the light, sum up a life of tenderness, inno- cence, single-heartedness, the usefulness but not the beauty of which has long been recognised. Its activities were the yeast which made the whole body of English social reform ferment. From it came the positive view of the state as a protector of the weak — and particularly our code of factory legislation; the co-operative movement is its direct fruit; public education and trade unionism owe it much. From the failure of Owen's schemes arose much more good than from the success of other men's schemes. Since he has lived it has been impossible for men to refuse to ponder over great fundamental social changes. Chartism was one of the first results of Owenism, and it was substantially in advance of Owenism in its method. That, the discerning eyes of Marx and Engels saw. It was political. It sought "no isles of the blest in the quiet sea of rest." It did not trouble its head about communities; it saw that economic problems were national not municipal; it saw further national problems could only be solved by national machinery. That was the philosophy of the Charter. The Reform of 1832 had blessed the middle class only. Why were the working classes left out in the cold? They did not want to be in for mere ceremony's sake. They wanted to be in because the feast was spread inside. They stood like the foolish virgins at a barred door, V THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 205 without having the comfort which the foolish virgins had — that they themselves were to blame. "We will get the land," they sang in one of their songs, "only when we get the Charter." The Charter was a means to an end. In the background of the Chartist mind was land reform, reduction of factory hours, better education, the control of machinery, associated industry. Chartism rose and fell. It is said that the workmen have always suffered from dishonest leaders. That does not go to the root of the matter, and is misleading. The Chartist movement shows not the dishonest leader but the wind-bag charlatan leader. The people have been sold, but only after they have shown an incapacity to choose leaders. Thus, in the 'thirties, we find a condition in England similar to what we have found in France. Gropings after association, an opti- mism regarding the curability of economic misery, an uncertainty as to method, a blind- ness as to social resistance, a gathering to- gether of the people in more or less revolution- ary companionships, that is what we see. To enable me to show the next grouping of these mobile and confused elements, I must again go abroad — to Germany this time. 3. Marx and Engels. The French Revolution had wiped off the map the lingering shadow of the Holy Roman Empire known as the kingdom of Germany, and the Treaty of Vienna had painted in again an impossible set of German states with Austria 206 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT as their political chief, but with Prussia as their real head. From those ruins and these impos- sibilities, the spirit of nationalism rose up. It was taught in the schools; it glowed like molten metal from the literature of the time. "Young Germany" heralded the March revolution of 1848. The spirit of nationalism, hating Austria, turned to Prussia to be its champion. In Prussia, every thought took a political turn. The organisation of the state, the power of the stale, the majesty of the state; politics, work- ing class combinations, revolution, the idea of corporate unity, of national wholeness — in these directions the minds of the Prussians and of the German nationalists ran. Lassalle began first. Born in 1825, he joined Marx and his friends in their revolutionary activities of 1848, but his temperament pre- vented him from doing conspicuous work in the organising, the moulding, the negotiating through which Socialism p assed from the stages i" which Saint-Simonianism, Fourierism and I enism had brought it. Lassalle's work there- fore belongs to the German movement alone and was done at a period somewhat later than I have now reached and where I must pause, as it is the most momentous period in the his- tory of Socialism. It belongs to the biography of Karl Marx, not to that of Lassalle. Marx was a Jew and a disciple of Hegel. His intellect was of the massive order which conceives big systems, which follows them through their ramifications, and which at the same time is capable of taking instant action on the passing incidents of the day. He was THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 207 born in 1818, in 1841 he finished his university studies, and next year he embarked upon the stormy waters of Prussian democratic politics. This marks the dividing line between the new and the old Socialist leaders. The German never thought of Utopian experiments. He began with statecraft, with democratic govern- ment, straight away. Moreover, he had received from Hegel a conception of social evolution. He saw society as a whole. Insti- tutions were historical products, not the benevo- lent, or malevolent, work of men's hands. He was not always consistent on this point, how- ever, although it is this view which was embodied in his wider generalisations. The misery around him could be cured only by social change. Prussia became too hot for him and he sought security in Paris. Here he came in contact with the Socialist movement, such as it then was, and Proudhon became his com- panion. But Proudhon was a Frenchman and belonged to the old generation of utopists. As he himself confessed towards his end, the greater part of his work consisted of unsys- tematised gropings after general laws and con- ceptions, and he inherited to the full the legacy of simple-minded optimism which the French Revolution left as a dowry to two generations of French social reformers and thinkers. And yet he had moved towards the border-line of the new epoch, for one of the points of dis- agreement between himself and the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier was that these latter believed too much in sudden transformations. 208 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT But he had come to see in governments nothing but tyrannies, and thus he forbade himself from ever joining the ranks of the newer move- ment. It is not to be wondered at that he and the systematic Marx fell out, and it was two Germans, Marx and Engels, and not a German and a Frenchman, who opened the new volume of the history of the Socialist move- ment. The preliminary preparation was complete The economic theory of Socialism was becoming pretty clear, political means were being thrust upon the workers of both Great Britain and Germany, Utopian communities had failed abso- lutely. Two things were required. The vague uncertainties of aim and means had to lie Bwepl aside, the moral inanities of some of the schools had to be suppressed, the mind of ialism had to be made definite. That was the first thing. The second was to place the whole movement on a political footing and to make it understand that it was a period in social evolution and not merely a dream of ingenious and kind-hearted men. This Marx and Engels did, and their first great act towards that end was the publication of the Communist Manifesto just before the Revolution of 1848. Earlier in the year, Marx had published a scathing criticism of Proud- hon, and hot foot upon that came the clarion call of the Manifesto commanding all the workers of the world to unite to end their misery. Amidst the most heart-rending poverty and destitution in London, Marx strove to com- plete his work on both its intellectual and its THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 209 political sides. Having to live sometimes on the proceeds which the pawnbroker handed over the counter, this brave and unbendable spirit wrote what has been called "the Bible of Socialism," Das Kapital. He died in 1883, and his body rests on the slope of Highgate Cemetery looking Londonwards. Engels died in 1895 and his ashes, according to his wish, were scattered on the sea. How did these men perform their work? They started as Hegelians of the Left — pupils of the great philosopher, who, whilst never able to emancipate themselves from the Hegelian method, had thrown off the Hegelian idealism. If the workers were to be emancipated at all, they felt it was to be by a grim struggle against the classes which were exploiting them. They took the proletariat up to a high mountain and showed it the wide panorama of progress. At every stage class was in conflict with class; and that lesson was soon learned. It dispelled all sorts of delusions about idealistic methods. Then another lesson was taught. The motive of the clashings was economic. History was not to be interpreted by spiritual and rational impulses but by economic appetites. Thus idealism received another deadly blow. Social- ism thus hardened, interpreted as the grand final stage of the struggle between the classes, appealed with new definiteness and new force to the masses. Its vagueness vanished. It became a cause which the meanest intellect could grasp and in which the humblest worker could play a part. The reign of the bourgeoisie was challenged at every point. The wage- 210 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT earner felt his common interest and was taught his common strength. In his various nation- alities he gathered together into a common camp; he looked across the boundaries of his nations and found the comradeship of men bending under a lot similar to his own; and the old clarion call came upon his ears: "Wage workers of the whole world! Unite!" Marx worked for immediate practical effects and he secured them. He sacrificed some of the intel- lectual accuracy of the Socialist case, but he made the Socialist movement. 4. Marxism and Revisionism. ' I must emphasise what Marx actually did. He contributed nothing to Socialism as a theory except in the sense that a gardener selects from a mass of herbage those plant-; which are of use, cultivates them, improves their strain, and produces them for the world to admire. This work is neither mean nor of ;i M-eondary value. "As to Socialism," says one of his most recent critics, "in relation to the future organisation of society. Marx has well- nigh not alluded to it." l Marx's reply would probably have been that he left such vain specu- lations to utopists. He explained the mechanism of capitalism; he explained historical evolution; he showed from both explanations the necessity of Socialism; he formed the army, and gave it the determination which was to bring Socialism into existence. He made many mistakes, both 1 Dr. M. Tugan-Baranowsky : Modern Socialism. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 211 in stating his theories and in forecasting events, but they were the mistakes of the man of action who had to do a certain definite piece of work, and his errors helped him. None of them vitiated the value of his labours or took a jot away from their utility. The Socialist move- ment will return to idealism, for, though some- times an unrecognised power, idealism has always existed in Socialism. But in Marx's time the great need was to organise the move- ment and engraft it upon the mind of the masses, to give it political form, to gather the democracy under its banners and start them on their march. That done Marx can be revised. The new problems which continue to face this army as it moves onwards necessitate frequent references to first principles, modi- fications of old dogmas, withdrawals of old forecasts. The goal remains, for it is the creation of such self-evident truths as this: That he who controls the economic conditions of liberty, controls liberty itself, and that association is better than separation, and co- operation than competition. But the path is trod by succeeding generations for diverse reasons. One generation follows it because it is harassed by misery, another, because it is illumined by reason; and these diverse motives exist side by side in the movement, their relative strength constantly fluctuating. Thus, to-day we have what is called the revisionist movement — which, however, is not always so much a departure from Marx as from Marxians. I have shown elsewhere in this book why I do not accept some of Marx's 212 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT explanations — for, after all, he was a commen- tator on Socialism, not the inspired instru- ment through which the Socialist faith was revealed. In his book the English title of which is Evolutionary Socialism ■ — the book which originated the revisionist movement in Germany — Mr. Bernstein parts company with Marxists on the following points amongst others. He denies that there is an imminent prospect of the breakdown of bourgeois society; he asserts that in the working of capitalism there is not a decreasing number of capitalists, all of them large, but that there is an increas- ing number of all kinds of capitalists; he rejects the dogma that in every department of industry concentration is proceeding with equal rapidity, and ihe challenges this with special reference to agriculture. He also emphasises the fact that the leaven of Socialism is now permeat- ing the capitalist lump, and that therefore Socialist organisations must work as trans- forming factors in society, and not only as revolutionary agencies. Marx, in his earlier yean (at any rate up to 1871, when the Paris Commune somewhat modified his view) con- sidered that the conquest of political power by the democracy was to be the signal of revolution; now great sections of the Socialist movement hold that that conquest is to be the occasion for transformation. Mr. Bernstein also modifies the Marxian view of the materialist conception of history and of economic necessity, of the class war and of value. And he does 1 Published in the Socialist Library by the Independent Labour Party. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 213 this whilst continuing to proclaim himself a Socialist, because he takes the true scientific view that every dogma and every theory is subject to the law of evolution as well as society itself. 5. Lassalle and the German Party. I must now outline the growth of the move- ment itself, beginning with Germany, which deservedly occupies the premier place in such a history. It was not until 1862 that Lassalle's activities were of any importance to the Socialist move- ment. The political reaction had begun in Prussia as the nationalist forces gathered themselves together for that struggle which only ended with the French war and the establishment of the German empire. The Liberals who then ruled Prussia, and who were about to be swept by Bismarck away into insignificance, "hoist by their own petard of nationalism" which carried militarism in its womb, had opened their pusillanimous policy of "standing where they were." Lassalle sepa- rated from them, declared that it was folly to prat about things which were unreal and verbal, and appealed to Prussia to take its stand upon the actual facts and go back upon democratic rule. The fires of Lassalle's nature were again ablaze. In 1862 he delivered a lecture which was nearly as epoch-making as the Communist Manifesto, and it was published under the title of The Working Men's Pro- gramme. Its purpose was to show that the 214 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT Prussian working men had now to unite for political purposes. The police paid attention to both the lecture and the orator who, after a trial and an appeal, was sentenced to pay a fine of about £15. Events then happened which were in some ways curiously like what occurred in our own country shortly after 1880 when the workers began to lose confidence in the Liberal Party. The working men of Leipzig, having left Liberalism, called a Labour congress. To this Lassalle sent an Open Letter in which be appealed to the workers to form a political party with social aims; be stated the Iron Law expressing the tendency of wages to fall to the ban- subsist- ence level and nothing more; and he advo- cated the establishment by state capital of self-governing productive associations in which every workman was to get the full product of his labour. The Congress adopted his proposals, and he addressed a few u'reat mcetin The Universal German Working Men's Association was farmed at Leipzig on May 2/>rd, 1863. It made one demand — universal suffrage. A work- ing class social programme was -<> much decora- tive effort unless the working classes had the vote. The German movement was begun. The melodramatic ending of its leader and hero in 186-1, struck it like a storm, and when the blast was over it was found that the organisation was left in a bad way. It had no leaders, no monev, and no coherence. Immediately after the founding of Lassalle's organisation another event happened, paralleled also in our later British experience. Liberal- V THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 215 Labour associations were formed, partly in opposition to Socialism, but partly also in oppo- sition to the growing dominance of Prussia, and they were therefore strongest outside Prussia. As a member of one of these, August Bebel first won his spurs. But the organisa- tions speedily drifted away from Liberalism where, from the very nature of the case, they could have no abiding place. The union of these associations declared first of all for uni- versal suffrage; in 1868 it gave in its adhesion to Marx's organisation, the International, and in the following year at Eisenach it formed itself into the Social Democratic Working Men's Party. The two German organisations then came to be known as the Lassalle and the Eisenach parties. The one was Prussian, the other was South German and Saxon. This division in German Socialism curiously enough survives to this day. Both sections were repre- sented in the Parliament of the North German Confederation, 1 but disagreed as to policy. They agreed in advocating a peace with France without annexation of territory, and their members were sent to prison. With the peace came a desire to join the two bodies. In Lieb- knecht and Bebel the Eisenach party had leaders, the Lassalle party had none. At Gotha in 1875 they joined hands, and formed the Socialist Working Men's Party of Germany. The united movement bounded forward, and the authorities made up their minds to hamper 1 The first electoral successes were won in Germany in 1867, when eight members were returned. 216 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT it. Two attempts made upon the Emperor's life in 1878 gave them their chance, and after an appeal to the country legislation to repress Socialism was carried. Newspapers were for- feited, meetings were prohibited, the organisa- tion was paralysed. The effect was to throw the people back upon themselves. They acted without organisation. Each man took upon himself the responsibility of finding out what he ought to do. Literature was smuggled into the country, the law was got round in many ways; at election after election the Socialist vote increased. The an Li-Socialist laws and the social reform legislation of Bismarck had both failed to remove the menace of red working- class politics, and in 1890 the repressive policy came to an end. Since then there have been changes in organisation, there have been ups ami downs, there have been internal contro- versies — particularly as regards parliamentary policy and the relation of the Socialist parties in the legislatures to other parties, but the history of Social Democracy in Germany has been a steady advance onwards. The maximum vote of the party before the Gotha union had been 352,000 in 1874; in 1877 it was 493,000; it dropped during the first years of repression, but rose from 1884 reaching 1,427,000 in 1890, 2,107,000 in 1898, 3,010,000 in 1903, and 3,258,968 in 1907. Its 1903 vote elected 81 members to the Reichstag; that of 1907, however, only elected 43. It is on the upgrade again, and the election of 1911 bids fair to be a record one for the party. In connection with the German Socialist V THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 217 movement one has to observe a special feature in German politics. Individualism as a politi- cal system never took root in the German mind. German public life was too much influenced by German philosophy for that to happen. Consequently, state activity has always been assumed — even by the most anti- Socialist chancellors and municipal authorities — as legitimate. We inherited from our Liberalism a suspicion of the state; the inheritance of modern Germany was a trust in the state. Thus German Socialism has been an intellectual power, even when politi- cally it has appeared to be impotent. 6. The French Party. The French Party has its tap root touching the Revolution, and it grew up through the schools, like Saint-Simonism, to which I have already referred. The revolutionary idealism of France finds the yoke of party galling and hard to bear. It blazed up in 1848, and again in 1871, and in both cases the flame was stamped out by the ruthless foot of the military. The hero of 1848 was Louis Blanc; the hero of 1871 was the people. Upon the heads of both, the prejudice that has written so much of our histories has put the crown of the fool and the knave, and no heads, in reality, are less justly decorated by that symbol. The national workshops of the first revolu- tion were started and managed contrary to Louis Blanc's advice, and in a spirit antago- nistic to him. Yet upon his back the burden 218 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT of their ludicrous failure had been placed. The scenes of popular riot, bloodshed and dis- order which compose the lurid picture generally painted to represent the Commune are little more than visions of the prejudiced and frightened imagination. Probably never did an army in occupation rule a city with more mercy and calmness than the communists ruled Paris, with their ftflsaaains thundering at their gates. The suppression of peaceful Radicalism in Great Britain in the days of Pitt was attended by more blundering cruelty and wanton persecu- tion than can be crowded into those terrible days in Paris by any historian, however pre- judiced, who slicks to the facts. After the Commune the Socialist movement in France lay like a land that had been crossed by fire. Hut a few workers soon came together again. The authorities -truck at them and scattered them. For a while Socialism was baffled. But Jules Guesde returned from his exile in Geneva, whither his communist activites had driven him, founded VEgalite in 1877, struck at the Anarchists who were busy in France at the time, preached Marxism, and the trade union congress which met at Lyons in 1878 resolved to call an international gathering of working men at Paris in the following year. The gathering was suppressed, and police barred the doors of the hall in the faces of the delegates. This only helped the French movement. Recruits came in fast; the trade union movement became more sympa- thetic. A representative gathering of working men held in Marseilles in 1879 adopted the V THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 219 name of the Socialist Labour Congress. It was wildly revolutionary, but the programme it accepted was drafted by Guesde and Lafargue, who was Karl Marx's son-in-law. Next year the final struggle between Socialists and trade unionists of the old school took place. The former were apparently worsted, but the latter had no determination, no zeal, and no cause, so they could make no use of their victory. Socialism marched gaily along. But there was weakness in the movement, and it was shown in the elections of 1881. Why were they disappointing? One group gave one answer, another gave another. The leaders set upon each other, and the movement split into two camps at St. Etienne next year. The division was between the Possibilists (those who were willing to approach Socialism through Socialistic reforms), led by Paul Brousse, who has been Mayor of Paris since, and the Impossibilists (those who anticipated a revo- lution and a more or less sudden break with the past), led by Jules Guesde. Strict Marxism was in reality the rock upon which the party trashed. Still, the French workmen had not enough camps, and a definite movement against parliamentary action was begun and the General Federation of Labour formed. The blood of revolution jumped through the French veins, and the half-dozen different groups into which the movement very quickly split appeared to be necessary to suit all dispositions. The two most important, however, were the so-called Impossibilists, led by Guesde, and the Inde- pendents, in whose ranks were several brilliant 220 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT professional men like Jaures and Millerand. Jaures had boon olocted to the Chamber as a Radical in 1885, but was dofoatod in 1889 when he returned to his professional chair. In 1893 he appeared as a Socialist candidate, and has been in the Chamber ever since. The elections of 1893 sent forty Socialists to the Chamber of Deputies. 1 Suddenly over the political horizon blazed the menace of the Dreyfus affair. The Guesdists Bald, "It is nothing to us"; Jaures said, "It is every- thing." Civil war again broke out in the party. Jaures supported Millerand when he joined the Waldeck-Rouflocmi Ministry (1890) in order to expunge the Dreyfus blunder from French hi-tory. The battle between the camps raged with fury until the International Socialist Con- gress sitting in Amsterdam in 1003 proclaimed peace. The groups united, the few individuals remaining outside soon ceased to count, and to-day the only division in the working-class movement in Prance is the Socialist Party on the one hand, and the anarchist General Federation of Labour on the other. During the Walt leek-Rousseau ministry when Millerand was Minister of Commerce, several measures of Socialistic significance were passed and the Socialist influence on the government was considerable. But on the resignation of the Premier (1002), when the work of the min- istry had been accomplished, the union of the Socialists with the Radical and Liberal sec- tions came to an end. A few years later (1906) when France had to face the problem of the 1 The first electoral victories were in 1887. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 221 ecclesiastical corporations, the government of the day had once more to lean upon the Socialists for help. It was a Socialist who was put in charge of the bill which settled these corporations. Later on (1909) this Socialist, M. Briand, became premier and held office till 1911. But perhaps partly owing to the opposition within the Socialist ranks to men who have become too closely identified with ministries, and also, perhaps, partly owing to changes which have crept over the men who have joined ministries, ex-ministers have ceased to be members of the Socialist party. The experience is the subject of heated controversy in the French party, in which the opinion at the present moment is strongly hostile to blocs — or, in other words, to co-operate with govern- ments as was the case during the Waldeck- Rousseau ministry. I can instance the growth of Socialism in France as I did with reference to Germany by giving the votes it has polled at elections. In 1893, 000,000 votes were polled; in 1898, 790,000; in 190-2, 900,000; in 1906, 1,120,000; and in 1910, 1,400,000. 7. The Italian Party. Italy is even more anarchist and revolu- tionary than France, and until middle-class and professional men put themselves at the head of the Socialist movement there, anarch- ism played havoc with Italian working-class organisation. Not until 1891, when Turati, a well-known lawyer of Milan, put his hand 222 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT to the plough, was much done to bring Italian Socialism on to the lines of Socialism in other European countries. Crispi's copying of Bis- marck's method of repression helped the move- ment greatly, and the corrupt state of Italian politics and the incompetence of Italian Liberal- ism gave powerful assistance. The Italian movement was therefore composed of two wings, one practical and political and the other anarchist. The former attracted to it some of the best intellects, and most distinguished professional men in Italy — Ferri and Lombroso, GabrieUe d'Annunxio and De Amicis; doctors and scientists, professors and lawyers. The conflicts between the government and the Socialists led to the proclamation of a general strike which resulted in riots and bloodshed in 1903-4, and as the storm struck Socialism the leaders quarrelled and blamed each other for the hurricane. Since then, the party has been unable to right itself. Secessions from its ranks have taken place, and at the moment it is rent with internal disputes carried on between the sections. Reformists who are will- ing to CO-operate with any party moving in the right directions, syndicalists who direct attention to the need of more trade union organisation and are rather anarchist in their depreciation of parliamentary action, integrali-ts who sit on the fence between the two and talk vainly and impotently of union between them, form the three great camps of Italian Socialism. V THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 223 8. The Belgian Party. The Socialist movement in Belgium is as well knit "as that in Italy is disjointed. It has the financial help of what is perhaps the most successful form of co-operation in the world; it has a solid trade-union movement behind it; it is capably led by Vandervelde; it has been singularly free from the criticisms of " impossibilists " which have proved to be such a drag upon Socialism elsewhere. The International Association had a strong grip on the country, but on its dissolution, disruption came upon the Belgian working- class movement. But by and by a new start was made, and in 1885 the Belgian Labour Tarty was formed. It has been pointed out often that this party is very much like the present British Labour Party. It declined to call itself Socialist though such was its inspira- tion; it was a union of workmen and of those who took a stand on economic grounds with wage-earners, to voice the needs of the workers. Of the Beligan movement Vandervelde has written "From the English, it adopted self- help and free association principally under the co-operative form; from the Germans, political tactics and fundamental doctrines which were for the first time expounded in the Communist Manifesto; and from the French, it took its idealist tendencies, its integral conception of Socialism considered as the continuation of revolutionary philosophy and as a new reli- gion continuing and fulfilling Christianity." 224 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT The Belgian movement is severely practical. Associated with it is an enormous co-operative movement; it is always willing to strike a blow for trade unionism; it is in the closest alliance with the Liberals in their opposition to the clerical reactionary government and in their demand for universal suffrage. The Conserva- tive government majority, in spite of the undemocratic electoral machinery of Belgium, has been brought down to vanishing point. WheD it disappears a difficult parliamentary situation will be created for the Socialists as they then, either as an independent factor without representation in the Cabinet or as a co-operating wing with representation in the Cabinet, will have to keep a coalition govern- ment in office. 9. The Party in America and other Countries. Distracted with revolutionary impulses and with the political unsettlement around, Socialism lias taken only a fitful foothold in places like Russia, Spain, Portugal and the minor European States. The Russian movement is of peculiar interest and is in many respects sui generis. The communal psychology of the Russian which he has inherited from the social organ- isation of serfdom and communism in which he lived till but a generation or so ago, made him but little susceptible to worldly goods and materialist enticements, and when the political 1 The Party secured representation in 1894 for the first time. V THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 225 freedom of the rest of Europe began to agitate the minds of the intellectuals of Russia, a movement partly Liberal and partly Socialist began. It found expression first of all in novels like Tchernychevsky's What is to be done? and finally bred Nihilism in politics, and a revival in literature. The untamable Bakunin, the courtly Herzen and the chivalrous Lavroff were in exile, but moved amongst the Russian students whom the revival in learning was sending to universities in France and Switzer- land. The movement for educating the peasant and for idealising him began, and this, being suppressed by a frightened government, inaug- urated terrorism, in the dark and stormy lanes of which the Socialist movement proper lost itself. Meanwhile, Russia became more and more industrial, and Socialism again appeared in the land. During the final decade of the last century trade unionism of a Social Democratic type attracted great numbers of workers in the larger industrial centres, and in addition to that, branches of the Social Democratic Party — originally composed of Russian exiles in Geneva, Paris and London — were formed in Russia. \Yhen political liberty appeared to be coming through the Duma, the various Socialist groups united and at one time there were about one hundred Socialist and Labour members sitting in this mock parliament. For the time being reaction is again supreme, and persecution, imprisonment, exile and death have driven the movement underground. In Finland, eighty-seven Socialists were elected to the Diet at the end of 1910, show- 226 THE SOCLVLIST MOVEMENT ing a gain of one seat. In the northern coun- tries Socialism is strong and well organised, and is ably represented in the parliaments; in Austria, keen racial conflicts have tried it sorely, but when universal suffrage was granted in 1906, it returned eighty -seven members to Parliament and secured well over 1,000,000 votes. Switzerland lias had a Social Demo- cratic Party since 1888, but this nominally democratic country has been notorious for its repressive measures and its unjust polities. Though the Swiss Socialist vote is equal to a representation of twenty-five members in Par- liament, it has only secured six seats. Japan, not to be outdone in any Western way, has had a Socialist Party since 1901, severely Marxian in its spirit. It has been Frequently .suppressed by the authorities, and latterly the leaders have been tried on capital charges and sonic of them executed. Japan is apparently to emulate the political methods of its late enemy, Russia. Argentine and Chili have also Socialist organisations and have been represented at International Socialist Con- gresses. Australia has both a Labour and a Socialist Party, the former strongly Social- istic though the economic basis of some of its demands is strikingly insecure, the latter Marxist of the rather impossibilist school; New Zealand has avoided a serious Socialist Party because Mr. Seddon led Liberalism into the Socialistic fold. South Africa has a small but vigorous Labour and Socialist movement which finds difficulty in making headway against the active financial powers that have dominated the V THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 227 Colony on the one hand and the conservative agricultural interests that have controlled it on the other. Western Canada has an aggres- sive Marxian section represented in the legis- lature; "Middle and Eastern Canada has the nucleus of an organisation somewhat like our own Labour Party and Independent Labour Party, and Alberta has returned one Socialist member to its new Parliament. The movement in America is rapidly assuming importance. At first inspired by foreign advo- cates and foreign thought, it was hard and dogmatic, and was of no account; but latterly owing to the rise of a powerful revisionist school with Milwaukee — which it captured municipally in 1910 — as its headquarters, it has won adherents in every state, and in the state elections of the fall of 1910, it registered 700,000 votes and won its first seat in the House of Representatives at Washington. First of all, the new land of America attracted the utopists who journeyed thither to found their New Harmonies and their Phalansteries, but one after another of these died out and even the most successful left no mark upon the public life or political activities of the country. Later on, many Socialist exiles from Europe sought homes there, but the States were not settled and could not respond to the agitations that were distracting the older Euro- pean governments. From 1870 sections of the International were formed in various places in America, and when this historical Association decayed in Europe its head-quarters were moved across the Atlantic in 1872. There it 228 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT died. Four years afterwards an attempt was made to form a national movement, the title of which was changed to the Socialist Labour Party in 1877. It was foreign, however, and Anarchism infested it. For years it struggled with its own impossibilism, with splits and rival parties, the most lurid event of these years of uphill fighting being the trial and execution of the Chicago anarchists in 1885. But in 1807 a new chapter in American Social- ism was opened with the founding of the "Social Democracy of America." In 1901, this united with the majority of the Socialist Labour Party, it assimilated itself to the soil, and it is now the successful fighting force of American Social- ism. Up to now it has been inspired mainly by intellectuals, but it is getting into closer and closer touch with the Trade Unions through the American Federation of Labour, and in a few years the alliance will be complete. Two sections of this survey of the world's Socialist movement remain to be reviewed, the British movement and the International, and that will be done in the next chapter. V CHAPTER XI the socialist movement {continued). 1. The British Party. To trace the beginnings of the Socialist move- ment in Great Britain, one has to go very far back into the economic speculation and criti- cism which assailed the development of com- mercialism. These speculations and criticisms took two forms. That which has loomed larg- est in history is the Utopian form of Owen- ism in its various aspects; that which is of most intellectual importance is the economic and juridical work of writers like Godwin, Thomson, Hall, Ogilvie and Hodgskin. These men touched the most assailable spot of the new economic system that was arising. It was a system of exploitation, and their claim was that labour had a right to its whole produce. I am convinced that when the political and organising phase of the Socialist movement has been successfully finished and when Socialists will be compelled to lay down an ecomonics and jurisprudence which will justify their pro- grammes, they will pass behind Marx and establish a connection with the school of thinkers I have named. 1 But these men left coteries, 1 In this connection I would specially draw the attention of students to the Right to the whole Produce of Labour which 229 880 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT not a movement, behind them. The time was not ripe for the latter. Political strife distracted attention, and the magnificent field which opened up for British commerce obscured its exploitations and baftlcd every attempt that was made to organise the work- ing-class revolt. The Chartist uprising blazed across the sky, but it was a meteor not a rising sun, and the British workers settled down to an allegiance to Radicalism and political reform, to trade unionism and co-operation. The turning-point in the mad came early in the 'eighties. In 1879, Henry George's Progress anil Poverty was published and had an untold effect in turning men's minds to BOcia] (plot ions. Poverty became a problem of public concern, not a mystery for private and individual treatment. The Radical Party in politics had been shipwrecked. The British guns thundering in front of Alexandria in 1882, at the bidding of a Liberal Government, did as much havoc in Radical clubs and associa- tions at home as they did in Egypt. An obscure body called the Democratic Fed- eration had been formed from the spirits who haunted the Kleusis Club in Chelsea (a famous home of militant Radicals) and who met on Clerkenwcll Green, in 1882, and it was the soil upon which the culture of Karl Marx was planted. Mr. Hyndman, an ardent dis- ciple of Marx, became the leader of the new is not only a splendid example of the work of its author, Anton Menger, but which in its English edition contains a long introduction by Professor Foxwell, which is as valu- able and scholarly as is the main body of the book itself. K THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 231 party which changed its name to the Social Democratic Federation ("Party" was substi- tuted for Federation in 1906) in 1884. The propaganda of Socialism was begun. The first start was not encouraging; for a split took place within a few months, and the Socialist League, with which the name of William Morris will always be associated, was formed. The Federation was Marxian out and out, the League had strong Anarchist leanings, and the two were at the time of their split supplemented by the eclectic Fabian Society which had sprung from a little idealist group, which Professor Thomas Davidson had formed a year or two before, called the New Fellowship. From these carnps the Socialist doctrines issued. The League weakened and gradually disappeared after helping Morris to enrich both Social- ism and English literature by poems, lectures and essays published in its paper, the Common- weal. The Federation was haughtily dogmatic and intransigeant; it occasionally broke out into open hostility against the trade union movement; it never appealed to the average British mind though it had a faith and an energy which ought to have moved mountains. It ran three candidates for Parliament in 1885, and they polled in Kennington and Hampstead 27 and 32 votes respectively, whilst Mr. John Burns who fought West Nottingham polled 598 votes. As the years went on, the Federa- tion was seen to be occupying a corner all by itself in our public life, and was isolated from every section, except the narrow dogmatic one, that was open to Socialist influence. 232 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT The Fabian Society, on the other hand, settled down to purely educational work. It preached its doctrines with remarkable brilliancy, but it adopted "Permeate" rather than "Organise" a> its watchword. Something had to be done to secure an advance, and this was all the more imperative because leader after leader amongst the trade unions had become converted to Socialism, and the annual battles at the Trade Inion Con 9 between the old school and the new were showing quite plainly that the new school was in the ascendant (although numer- ically in ■ great but lessening minority) and that none of the younger men of influence were ranging themselves with the old guard. The Dock Strike had 1 n won in 1889 and the new Unionism proclaimed. The battles of Trafalgar Square had been fought and had stirred many people's minds. Throughout the country, various local Labour Parties were being formed, a Scottish Labour Party had been started as early as 1S88, and that year Mr. Keir Hardie appeared ai an independent labour candidate for Mid-Lanark and polled til!) votes. During the Trade i'nion Congress meeting in Glasgow in 1S02, a conference of working-class leader- was held to consider the position. The result of this and other negotiations was the palling of representatives from Labour organisations, Fabian branches and other Sociali-t societies, at Bradford early in 180:>. and the Independent Labour Party, with Mr. Keir Hardie a< its leading spirit, was launched. Its object was Socialism, its method THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 233 was to unite all the forces owning Socialism as their goal and inspiration. It rejected abstractions and dogmas, and it appealed directly to the every-day experience of labour. It proposed to enter politics at once, and its success was Instantaneous. Indeed, the harvest \\a> ripe. The Party challenged both Liberals and Conservatives, and before it was many months old won municipal elections. At the General Election of 1803 Mr. Hardie was returned for South West Ham, and the new Tarty proceeded to contest by-election after by-election, invariably polling a substantial number of votes. The details of its subsequent history need not be recorded here. Hut the working out of its characteristic and immediate purpose has resulted in one of the most remarkable changes in British politics. The Party foresaw from the beginning that under any free government the Socialist movement must unite for political purposes with the industrial organisations of the workers. That is the explanation of the battles in the Trade Union Congresses. This polif these ta-k>. the [ndependent Labour Tarty busied itself with both «>f them; the Social D ratk Federation drifted into ■ backwater) tin- [ndependent Labour Party t in midstream. A study <>f the fates which rtook each of these bodies i> one ..f the most fruitfully rtive which offer! itself to the student of politi When the n battles died away, the Trade Union Congress which nut at Plymouth in 1*!>!> resolved that a Con- ner, to \n hi< h all Socialist ami trade-u: bodies were to !><• summoned, should !>«• held to discuss tin- possibility of union for political purposes. In tin- Memorial Hall, at the end of tin- following February, 129 delegates met, some to bury tin- attempt in good-humoured tolerance, a few t<» make sure that burial would be it- fate, hut tin- majority determined to e it a chance. One of tin- greatest wn m-^M's of the working-dass movement in Great Britain, the la favour. \ report or two in a few newspapers was all the notice that was taken of thii momentous con" f er cno e, ami for sii yean the Party was allowed row in obscurity, until in 1906 thirty Mcm- I I 1' liiament Were elected Ullder its BUSpici The result came ;i- a holt from the blue. The only trade union of any imp' which then remained outside- the Miners' I (ration— eame in in 1909, and a '-olid phalanx of Labour candidates went to the polls in January, 1910. Forty were elected, and the Party increased its repn tion by two in December that year. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 285 The Lnbour Party is not Socialist. It is a union of Socialist and trade-union bodies for immediate political work — the Social Dem- ocratic Party having joined in at fir-t bul after ■ year's co-operation having returned to its isolation in 1901. But it is the only political form which evolutionary Socialism can take in a country with the political traditions and methods of Great Britain. Under British con- ditions, ■ Socialist Party is the l;ist, not the first, form of the Socialist movement in politics. 2. The International. Now I can turn to what i- one of the most important characteristics of th< Socialist movement, its international organisation. In- ternationalism is as much a mode of Socialist action, as it is of Catholic organisation. I have shown how Socialism has taken root in every land where capitalism exists, and these national movements all recognise their kin- ship with each other. "Socialist" is a pn word which ITC8 a welcome in every working-class organisation from China to Peru. The ( ommuniti Manifesto, echoing an idea that had been prevalent in working- class associations for some years previously, ended with the appeal to the workers of the world to unite, and its authors and their followers have never thought of the move- ment except as one uniting all nations. Its earnest form was an international association. The spirit of both Liberalism and the working-class parties in the middle of the M6 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT nineteenth century was international. The Napoleonic wan had exhausted Europe, and the culture <>f the time was cosmopolitan. Begel finished his Phenomenology of the Spirit within BOUnd (tf tlie cannon at Jena, ami t trouble hi> head aboul the battle. Goethe 3 equally indifferent to tin' national troubles of Germany when he was not pained by them. The active spirits amongsl the workers were exiles drifting between Paris and London carry- ing on propaganda in every capital. Such a band was one of the firM organisations t<» welo me Man a^ a leader, ami in [847 a Communist \\a^ formed in London. For this Les Marx and Engels drafted tin- Communist Mniii- Hut the Revolutions of 1848 pushed both the I.< .md the Manifesto into the background for the time being. The failure of the Eli olutions was written in Mood and repression. Hut Socialism survived and gave an impetus to the re-born political movements in the various countries; and in each >t as I have already told. So< aalisl groups struggled to pain and maintain a foothold. This went on till the International Exhibition in London, in 1862, provided for the international mo ment another chance of organising itself. A deputation of French workmen came to the Exhibition under official auspices, and entertained by English workmen. Nexl year another deputation came over and was again received publicly. The results were more than the rulers had bargained for. For, on the 28th of September 1864, an inter- national meeting was held in London at THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 237 which a committee was elected to form and carry on the business of an International Work- ing-men's Association. The duty of drafting a constitution was first of all entrusted to Mazzini, but his modes of thought and action were not congenial to the spirit of the com- mittee, and the task was ultimately trans- ferred to Marx. The note struck was Social- ist. In spite of the growing wealth of the nations, the lot of the working classes was not improving; the individualist economics of the capitalists was breaking down both in theory and practice. And once more the clarion note sounded: "Working-men of all lands, Unite '"' The declared purpose of the International was to unite all the national working-class movements that were aiming at such political and economic changes a- would emancipate the people from their mi-cry. Unfortunately, two sections of thought had to fight for its custodianship. The Communist, with his antagonism to centralised authority and his belief in the free commune and bee association of workpeople, stood upon a road sharply diverging from that upon which the Socialist proper stood, and ought never to have been in the same movement. But the final aims of both were pretty much the same, however divergent their methods might be, and so they met each other to contest for the selection of the road. The Congresses of the International were their battle grounds. The Belgian government at once prohibited the next Congress which was to be held in Brussels, so it met in London. In Geneva, in B38 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 1866, :i programme including an eight hours' • lay and drastic educational changes was adopted, but a jarring note of discord mi itruck. The French delegates mistnisted "intellectuals." These men had stirred up strife by their t beorising and dogmatising; but, on the other hand, had they bean excluded, the Inter- national would have been deprived of the only brains which understood it and could lead it. Their >>t\ i<<> were retained. At Lausanne, at Brussels, at Basle, in succeeding IB, and at the Hague in 1S7^, the Social- ism of the Association became more pro- nounced. Resolutions in favour of land nationalisation, of the public control of trans- port, of co-operative ownership <>f the means of production, of a general strike in the even! of war. were earned, and this advance in opinion was echeed by strikes and political agitations in the respec t ive nations. The Congress of ls7n wn> to he held in Paris but the outbreak of the war with Germany intervened. The Commune followed. The International hail to face the storm. Many of the more rvative WOrking-CUUM organ- isations were hesitating, feeling that things were being driven too far and fast; others taking the rlniw irar doctrine quits literally wire jealous of the professional men within their ranks; above all there was the old quarrel between the Socialist proper and the Communist who u;is following Proudhon rather than Marx. This last conflict had grown more bitter Congress after Congress. The Socialist fashions his action in political and state moulds, the THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 280 Anarchist works for self-governing co-operative communes and workshops. The followers of Proudhon and Blanqui disturbed the harmony of Geneva and Lausanne. liakunin entered the scene at Brussels and Basle, and attacked Marx both personally and as a leader. The storm of the Commune, for which in reality the Inter- national had only ;m indirect responsibility, l>ut with which it was associated in the popular mind, broke upon the organisation at a time when internal strife had dissipated its strength. Tin- events in Prance forced a grand battle between the political and the industrial win of the movement, and in 1879 the Anarchist ction had to be expelled. The International. though it had won in its struggle against its disease, was mortally afflicted. bike a stricken King Arthur, it was borne away aCTOSS the sea. In New York it lingered on for a few- months. A feeble Congress was held in Geneva in 1873, but that was the end. The international proletariat was not ready to unite; the leaders had not yet prepared the foundation with sufficient care; they were still disCUSSing their plans; the house they built tumbled down about their ears. And yet, it was not the idea but only the plan that failed. Each nation fell back upon itself and gathered its workmen into movements appro- priate to their own capacity and opportunity Different trade unions, co-operative societies, peace associations held international meetings, and in the fulness of time the International was born again. In 1889 about 400 delegates went to Paris 210 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT from the various Socialist and working-class organisations and formed what is officially called the Premier Congrle d< In NouvelU Inter- nationale. In 1 s!) l the Cnn_'n">-i met again in Brussels, and in 1893 in Zurich. Once more the Anarchist trouble had to be faced and it was settled at the London Congress which met in the Queen's Hall in 1896. Day after day the battle raged on Hour and platform. The wild figures, the furious oratory, the hurricane dona "f that Congress will never I>e for- gotten by those who wren then'. Hut in the end, the Anarchists were routed. They had i" go. The Internationalist Socialist move- ment Once and for all declared for political action, for the conquest of the State by parlia- mentary means, for revolution by evolution. Now, once every three years, this parliament of the wor k ers meets to discuss the concerns common to the whole movement. Every im- portant nation under the son is r e p res e n ted at it. At it every parliamentary leader of the movement appears. In the interval betwi Con -. business is carried on by an Inter- national Bureau, with its headquarters in Brussels, upon which every nation is r ep r ese nted, and a comniitt.' listing of one representa- tive from each parliamentary group re presen ting Socialism and Labour in the parliaments of the world, keeps each parliamentary party in touch with all the others. The field covered by these Congresses may best be visualised by a summary of the reso- lutions passed during the last ten years at Amsterdam, Stuttgart and Copenhagen. Mili- THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 241 tarism has been condemned and a citizen army approved instead of a conscript army where that is in vogue; international strife has been declared to be the result of capitalist rivalry; imperialism and an acquiring of col- onics have aNo been opposed on the ground that they are only a form of exploitation of the weaker races and the fruits of the struggle in which capitalism is engaged to expand markets at any COft A reasoned policy of co-operation between Socialists ami trade- union bodies has been drafted and a declara- tion made that the end of all trade-union action must be Socialism, and a detailed series of propositions laying down the conditions under which the emigration and immigration of workmen should proceed has been carried. A sketch code of international labour laws has been agreed upon, and measures for dealing with unemployment discussed and accepted. A declaration has been made against votes being given to any one class of women (what is known in this country as "the limited Bill") and in favour of adult suffrage "without distinction of sex." Socialist unity in the various countries has been recommended, and in addition to these more general subjects, resolutions dealing with important questions of international policy, which were before the public when the various Congresses sat, have also been passed. This surely is the nucleus of "the parlia- ment of man." The Congress is ready to strike at everything which makes for inter- national discord and national deterioration; MA THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT it is prepared to support everything which makes for peace and goodwill and which advances the well-being of the common folk. But it is primarily concerned with the dis- COSsion and the settlement of problems which VIM within Socialism as it advances in the various countries and which meet Socialists in their propagandist and j>olitical work, and as the parliamentary parties increase in size it takes upon iNelf more and more of their character and its business reflects more and more closely their point of view. CONCLUSION "IT MANKIND CONTINTK TO IMPROVE*' "The form of association, however, which, if mankind continue to improve, must be expected ID the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief and workpeople without a voice in the management, but the aaaociation of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively Owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under manai'irs elected and removable by themselves." xnUS Mill wrote in the final edition of his Political Economy. And so, in the end. Mill grew out of the principles which were as swaddling clothes to him, and ranged himself amongst those who believed that the future belonged to Socialism. His declaration of faith was in the form of a prophecy, but of a prophecy which was the ending of a life devoted in singleness of purpose to inquiry, to thought, to a pursuit of truth. And he qualified his forecast by the condition: "if mankind continue to improve." That is the unknown factor. There are signs of degeneration all around us. We cannot draw upon the reservoirs of good physique which once were available in large village popu- 243 244 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT lations; we have not that mental robustness which comes from fresh air, sound and plain food, and a contact with the invigorating life of nature, of fecund seed-time and joyful harvest, of tuneful spring and solemn winter. The family unity is weakened; the motherly housewife almost belongs to the blessings that wire; the head of the household ifl becoming a survival of words that once hail a meaning but arc now but a reminiscence. The mascu- line strength of Puritanism has gone with its repulsive austerity, and education, planted on minds of impoverished boO, is producing sickly and wccily Mowers of simpleton credulity and fabc imagination. The comforts which the too- wealthy seek arc Hy/antine; the pleasures which the too poor follow unfit them for manly effort. Humanitarianisni has forbidden nature to s] ;i y the weak; a lack of scientific forethought. and foresight has prevented the community from raising the mas, M > that the surviving weak may not lower its virility. We are in the mor asse s of ■ valley and our salvation lies on the way up to the hills. '"If mankind con- tinue to improve"! We cannot go back; we can go on. or. standing, sink down in the mora--. Progress is possible in one of two ways. W e may return to the mechanical selection of nature. 'We may say to the heart: "Be still," and to the sympathies: "Sleep." The cir- cumstances of life will then protect the existence of certain adaptable qualities. On the stage of nature around man, there is passing a never- ending pagentry of victim and victor. The strong trample the weak down; the hidden CONCLUSION 245 survive in their shadows. The late brood, insufficiently trained by the mother when she has to leave it to shift for herself in autumn, is preyed upon; the earlier brood, carefully nurtured and taught well in the school of the woodlands, survives to teach its own offspring hmv to prese r v e lilV. The foolish gaudy thing sparkling in the sunshine amongst the leaves i^ pounced upon, and nature knows it no more; the still sober thing which looks like a leaf, or a twig, or a speckled shadow eludes the eye of its hungry pursuer and lives. Forms change ;h nature herself changes. Cultivation drove the grey wolf and the wild ox from Great Britain, the use of firearms i^ exterminating the giraffe, the introduction of the pig to the Mauritius put an end to the dodo, a change in Atlantic currents nearly destroyed the tile fish of the North American OOast, alterations of climate have driven whole families of animals — like the tapir — away from old haunts and homes, the development of true bird-like habit > introducing the flying reptiles into new con- ditions doomed those which retained their jaws of teeth and failed to produce horn-cased bills and beaks, the joining of North to South America in comparatively recent times led to the wiping out of certain South American types of life like some of the armadilloes, and so on. With man. it is different. If the climate changes, he modifies his clothes and his habi- tation. He finds out many inventions first of all to defy nature and then to exploit her. In common with some other animals he protects himself by forming groups, and these groups 24« THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT carry on the war of nature. But they nourish and nurture within themselves both individual intelligence and personal and group laws of existence, ethics, customs, justice, religion. And thus a new path of progress is discovered, the path which consists of an intelligent concep- tion of ends and purposes and an adoption of rational means to those ends. Man supple- ments nature. He robs her, so to speak, of her secrets and he uses them for his own rational purposes. Nature produces everything she can and kills everything she can; man produces what he wants and kills what he does not want. Nature's selection is mechanical, man's selection is rational; nature's selection is acci- dental, man's selection is purposeful. The partridge is dressed in khaki because nature killed its kith and kin dressed otherwise, man dresses himself in khaki that he may not be killed at all. Human progress is not the result of the natural law of the survival of the fittest, but of the human art of the making of the fittest. Nature surrounds her children with death, man surrounds his with life. Man, through his intelligence, co-operates with nature and with his fellows in order that he may live. The long drawn-out tale of human progress is shadowed by error and catastrophe, by weari- some journeys in the wilderness, by Canaans which, when yet lands beyond Jordan, were overflowing with milk and honey, but which, when conquered, were almost barren; and chapter after chapter which opens like a litany closes like a dirge. But amidst the confusion, CONCLUSION 247 the conflicts, the defeats, a survey of the whole pageant reveals some order, and shows the guiding purpose of an underlying idea. The realm of justice extends, the essential equality of man creates and modifies institutions, govern- ment becomes more and more a matter of consent, and the consenters become more and more active participants in it. That is what a general sweep of the pageant reveals. A closer examination also shows law and order in details. A struggle can be detected between individual freedom and social discipline, between liberty and authority, between the interests which for the time being can use social organisation for their own benefit and those victimised and exploited by such a use. This conflict is not carried on in a straight line by a steady series of advances, but rather by a rythmic pulsing, putting now one interest and now the other in the ascendancy. The state to-day is anarchistic. We have gone well through our epoch of exploitation by individuals and classes, and the diastole and systole of history goes on. Or, to use a more familiar simile, the pendulum swings back- wards — but not along the path of its forward swing. It has moved onwards. Social organi- sation has now to be carried to a further stage. And what has to be the subject of this organi- sation? It can be but one thing — economic power. The individualist epoch created that power, organised it, and broke down under its load. Like the fisherman in the Eastern tale who liberated the genii, individualism has been unable to control its own discoveries. The 248 THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT community, the state, the whole of the people — under whatever Dame it may be the pleasure of different men to designate it — must now take over this power, bridle it and harness it and make it do social work. This i> tin- genesis of the Socialist movesaent: this is Socialism. But ai these changes in organisation, these fluctuations between individualism and sociality, subserve tin- end <>f human liberty and p rogre s s, bo the motive force behind Socialism is not merely mfirhanimj perfection sad social economy. but fife itself, Hence, around it an- ran I i \ i 1 1 _r impulses of religion, of ethics, of art, of literature, those creative impulses which fill man*S heart from an inexhaustible store of hope and aspiration, and which make him find not only hi> greatest happiness but also the very reason for life itself, in pursuing the pilgrim road which, mounting up over the bills and beyond the horizon, winds towards the ideal. BIBLIOGRAPHY I. GENERAL STUDIES ON SOCIALISM 1. Independent. Mr. Kirkup's two books — An Inquiry into Socialism, 1908, Longman's, $1.40 net, and A History of Socialism, 1909, Black, 710 net — are satisfactory and reliable. 2. Socialism Explained by Socialists. The great text-book of modern Socialism is, of course, tho three volumes of Capital, by Karl Marx, 10,6 per volume. Tho first two are published by Sonnenscheiu, the third by the In- dependent Labour Party. The Socialist Library, Independent Labour Party, 1/6 per volume. Vol 1. Socialism and Modem Science, by Prof. Ferri. This is a Marxian statement in terms of Darwin- ism. Vol. 2. Socialism and Society, by J. Ramsay MacDon- ald. An explanation of Socialist theory from the point of view of biologioal evolution. Vol. 3. Studies in Socialism, by Jean Jaures. Vol. 5. Collectivism and Industrial Evolution, by E. Vandervelde. One of the most important contributions made in defence of Socialism since the publication of Marx's Capital. Vol. 7. Evolutionary Socialism, by Edward Bernstein. The book which created the modern Revisionist movement in ( li rmany. F. Enqels. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific — 1892, Sonnen- schein, 2/6 — still remains a most effective statement. Fabian Essays rN Socialism. 1890, Fabian Society, 1/6. R. C. Ensor. Modern Socialism. 1907, Scrihner, $1.50 net. A compilation of speeches and pronouncements by leading Socialists with a useful introduction. 249 250 BIBLIOGRAPHY 3. Socialism bt Non-Socialists. Much of the literature published on behalf of the Anti- Socialist movement ia useless for serious students. W. H. Mallock. A Critical Examination of Socialism. 1908, Murray, 6/-. H. O. Arnold Fosteh. English Socialism of To-day. 1908, Smith Elder, 2/6. The Case against Socialism. 1908. Allen, 5/- net. With a preface by the Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour. 4. Christian Socialism. Conrad Noel. Socialism in Church History. 1910, Palmer, 5/- not. A. V. Woodward. Christian Socialism in England. 1903, Sonncnschein, 2/6. An historical account. II. BIOGRAPHY E. Bernstein, Lassalle. 1893, Sonnenschein, 2/6. A. J. Booth. Saint-Simon. 1871, Longmans, out of print. J \V Maceail. William Morris. 2 vols., 1899, Longmans, $3.60 net. Frank Podmore. Robert Owen. 1906, out of print. J. Spargo. Karl Marx. 1910, Huebsch (New York), $2.60 net. III. MISCELLANEOUS W. H. Beveridge. Unemployment. 1909, Longmans, 12.40 net. A. L. Bowlet. Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nine- teenth Century. 1900, Cambridge University Press, 6/-. A. L. Bowlet and G. H. Wood. History of Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century. A series of very valuable papers which have been appearing in the Statistical Society's Journal intermittently since 1898. J. A. Hobson. The Evolution of Modern Capitalism. 1894. Walter Scott, 2/6. B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison. A History of Factory Legislation. 1910, King, 3/6. BIBLIOGRAPHY 251 H. M. Htndman. Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century. 1892, Sonnenschein, 2/6. H. W. Macrostt. The Trust Movement in British Industry. 1907, Longmans, $2.50 net. IV. TOWARDS SOCIALISM 1. Co-Operation. H. D. Llotd. Labour Co-partnership in Great Britain. 1898, Harper, $1.00. Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sidney Webb). The Co-operative Movement. 1899, Sonnenschein, 2/6. 2. Legislation. W. P. Reeves. State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand. 2 vols., out of print. 3. Municipal and Administrative. Lord Avebuby. On Municipal and National Trading. (Anti-Socialist.) 1907, Macmillan, $1.00 net. Leonard Darwin. Municipal Trade. (Anti-Socialist.) 1903. Dutton, $3.50 net. F. W. Jowett. The Socialist and the City. 1907, Allen, 1/- net. 4. Trade Unions and the Labour Movement. Conrad Noel. The Labour Party. 1906, Unwin, 1/-. Frank Rose. The Coming Force. 1909, Independent Labour Party, 1 /-. Sidney and Beatrice Webb. History of Trade Unionism. 1901. Longmans, $2.50 net. V. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. P. Kropotkin. Mutual Aid. 1902, Heinemann, 1/-. D. G. Ritchie. Darwinism and Politics. 1895, Sonnen- schein, 2/6. D. G. Ritchie. Principles of State Interference. 1891, Sonnenschein, 2/6. 25i BIBLIOGRAPHY SOCIETIE8 Within recent years a considerable amount of literature has been issued by propagandist Societies on the subject of Social- ism. It can be procured from the following Societies: — Socialist. The Independent Labour Party. 28, Bride Lane, Fleet St., B.C. (This society represent! both is its methods and in its opinions the evolutionary a.«|"' I ilism.) Th<- Fahiun Society, 8, Clements [on, Strand, W.C. The SoeuW Den l'arty, Chandos Hall, Maiden Lane, (DoKni:tti'' M.irxi The Church Booialisl I. tgtM, Rev. W. H. Paine, 37, West- mir. ace Gardens, S.W. The Free Chnx i lmt League, Rev. Herbert Dunuico, 01, Elm Vale, Liverpool. Anti-Socialist. The And nion. 58, Victor W. The London Muni.ip.il Society, 11, Tothill St., S. W. The Anti-Socialist Union of the Free Churches, 38, John St., W. C. INDEX Advertising, OS America, Socialist Party in, 228 Anarchism, 123-125 Argentine, 226 Aristocracy and Capitalism, 36, 42 Art under Socialism, ITS 1N5 Australia, 119, 107, 100, 220 Austria, 200. ! Ball. John, 17, 18 Bankruptcy, 76 Bebel, August. 215 Bekian Socialist Party, 223- 22S Bernstein, Edward, 212 Bismarck, 165 Blanc, Louis, 102, 165, 218 Booth. Charles. 31, 35, 71 Bundesxath, 10S Cade, Jack, 17 Canada, 227 Capital and Labour, con- flicts, 43-16 concentration of, 46-55, 111) and mechanical inven- tion, 43 in politics, 97 social effect of, 128 Capitalism, control of, by agent9 48, 55 failure of, 77 literature and, 82-88 religion and, 78-82 Capitalism, science and, 88- 92 waste of capital, 64-66 waste of lal)our, 66-70 Capitalists, small, 52-55 Chartism, 204, 230 Chili, 226 Christian Socialists, 79-81 Class War, 18, 147-150, 191, 210 Commercial travelling, 69 trusts, effect on, 68 Commercialism, a phase, 94 its results, 83, 85. 87, 95, 98, 128, 181, 187 its end, 97 Commune and municipalisa- tiun, 101, I'OO Communism, 122 i mmunist League, 237 Communist Manifesto, 196, 208, 235, 236 Comtism, 198 Confiscation, 158, 161-163 Darwin, 114, 115 Democracy, 150-154 Democracy and American Constitution, 25 French Revolution, 23 legislation, 105 national interests, 19 politics, 106 Socialism, 107-111, 135, 154 the state, 26, 106, 136 Dundee, social condition, 31, 71 253 254 L\DEX Economic Determinism, 91, 142-146 Engels on, 146 Engela, 92, 161, 162, 196, 204. 208 Equality. 28, 138-141 of opportunity. 139, 192 Mallock on. 140 Equal remuneration, 112 Fabian Society, 231, 232 Factory legislation, 164, 204 Family, x, 155. 187 Feudalism, 22, 27 transition from, 41 Finland. 226 Fourier, 00, 124. 163. 196. 199-203. 207 Freedom under capitalism, 73 French Revolution, 22-20, 197. 201, 206 French .Socialist Party, 218- 221 votes of, 221 Galileo, 114 George, Henry, 230 German Social Democratic Party. 213-217 votes of. 216 Gueede. Jules, 218. 219 Guilds. 44 Human nature, goodness of, 124 Income tax, 160 Independent Labour Party, xi. 282-284 Individual right, 17 Individualism and Socialism, 26-28, 123 atomic, 26 in nineteenth century, 26, 27 Industrial Insurance, 74, 127 Industrial Revolution, char- acteristics of, 41—46, 202 Inheritance, 129 Intemperance, 33-35 Interest, justification of, 62 International, The, 227, 235- 242 Congresses, 238-243 and anarchism, 237-242 Israel, social religion of, 202 Italian Socialist Party, 221. 222 Japan, 226 Jaurea, Jean, 220 Joint Stock Companies and capitalism, 47-50, 118 Labour, 61 exploitation of, 130, 131, 280 waste of, 66-70 Lat*>ur Party, 167, 168, 232- 235 Lassalle. 151, 164, 206. 213- 216 Legislation, effect of, 73, 74 Liberal epoch. 24. 25. 133 Liberty, and the state. 135 conditioned, 135, 166,211 law and, 137 of Liberal epoch, 25, 134 political, 133 propertied view of, 24, 106 qualitative, 138 Literature, 82-88 Lollardy, 17 Ludd. Ned. 177 Luther, 23 Machinery, 176-178, 203 value of, and labour, 46 Mallock. \V. H.. 29. 30, 51. 52. 61. 71, 140, 141, 171, 172, 174, 184 Mc_x, Karl, 61. 91. 92, 102, 141. 146, 148, 162. 196.206- 213, 230, 233, 236. 239 Mallock misquotes, 61 Marxism. 210-213. 219 Materialist conception of his- tory. 142-146. Mechanical invention, and capital. 43. 176, 177 under Socialism, 176-178 INDEX 255 Mercantile Marine Company, 63 Middle class rule, 24, 105 Monopoly, 40, 55, 66-61, 132, 159, 160, 189 More, Sir Thomas, time of, 39 Utopia, 39 Motives, 113, 175 Municipalisation, 26, 101,1 19, 157 Mutual aid, 15-17, 27, 106 National wealth, 70, 71 distribution of, 30-35, 49,52,71, 126 workshops (1848), 164, 167, 217 New Zealand, 226 Norwich, social condition, 31 Over-capitalisation, 50, 65 Owen. Robert, 99, 196, 197, 202-205 Peasants' Rising, 17, 38 Pier» Plowman, 38 Poverty, 30-41, 70-77, 115 statistics of, 29-35 Prices, 63. 68 Printing-press under Social- ism, 182 Private property, conditions of. 132 exploitation, 131 foundation of society, 126-129 in industrial capital, 132 in land, 132 liberty and, 125, 130 limitation of, 130 Mill on, 126 Private property, Socialism and. 125-132 Production, limitation of, 68 purpose of, 65 Progress and Poverty, 230 Proportional representation, 153 Protestantism, 22 Proudhon, 80, 207, 239 and the International, 239 Referendum, 153 Reichstag, 108 Religion, 78-82 Religious Education, 156 Renaissance, 22 Rent, nature of, 56-61, 159 Revisionism, 212 Revolution, 103, 104, 170 Right to work, 75, 163-169 Rowntree, Seebohm, 31, 35, 71 Russia, 225 Saint-Simon, 196-202, 207 Science and commercialism, 88-91 Shareholders, a class, 48 Slavery, wage, 73, 135, 165 Social Democratic Party, 231, 234 Social Revolution, 104 Socialism and ability, 171-178 anarchism, 123-125 art, 86, 178-185 class war, 147-149 communism, 122, 123 confiscation, 158, 161- 163 definition of, xi democracy, 107, 150-153 education under, 173, 174 equality, 112, 139-141 family, the, x, 155, 156, 187 finance, 158 historical evolution, 15- 28, 143, 195-243 human motive, 175 individualism, 124, 164 inheritance, 129, 130 liberty, xi. 132-138, 193 literature, 82-88 machinery, 176-178 minorities, 185-189 newspapers, 185-189 poetry, 180 : 181 2.56 INDEX Socialism and politics. 103, 110, 152. 154-169, laS, 208,240, 24J property, L26 132 publishing 1M religion, f$ aa ive Rovcrn- mcnt. ni. 151 LOS 104, 150 sci' ■ 91 102, 114 l-'l tendencies towards, 99, llf, 121,111 thesta- us, 101, 232, 241 I • . shoo manager. 180 104 Socialism in Am< I'.. Lghim, 223 224 J 17 221 213 -'17 Lb, H»s hi I its politics, 108-111, [( ily, 221, - Japan. . ritaerUn Socialist distribution, 112- 123 Socialist League. 231 methods, 9W-1J1 palliatives, 154-156 programme, 154-169 South A in D philanthropists, 202 State capitalism, 157 . purpo 1. 10, 28) 204 ( 'orporation, American, 73, 102 k Exchange, 63 Egle fur Life, 77. OS, . rland, loU. Taxation, 1 Thrift, Tra'! 72 • ■ Union Congress, 238, - !•• unionism, t">. 7.", Trust* 17. 61, 62, 66, 6G, 68, lis. i.o, 190 T>! 17 mployment, 40, 71 73, 16 tl DtopiftD method, 99-103, 170 Emile, 161, Village community, L'0. _'l It Ham, 31 M' UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY This book is DUE on the last date stamped below JUNUmt AUG 1 49 3 '5% 2 >'■ # # SEP Form L-9- LOS ANGELES UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 388 605 8