SOCIALISM 
 
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SOCIALISM 
 
 ITS GROWTH & OUTCOME 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'THE EARTHLY PARADISE,' 'NEWS FROM NOWHERE,' ETC. 
 
 AND 
 
 E. BELFORT BAX 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY,' ' THE RELIGION OF 
 SOCIALISM,' ETC. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. 
 
 NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1893 
 
 •• 
 
. ..:..: ... .- :• :*• • ••• •• 
 

 PREFACE 
 
 In offering this book to the public, we 
 have to say that we thought it useless to 
 go over the ground covered by so many 
 treatises on Socialism, large and small, 
 hostile and friendly, that have appeared 
 of late years. We have dealt with our 
 subject from the historical point of 
 view ; this, we are aware, is a less 
 exciting method than the building up 
 of " practical " Utopias, or than attempt- 
 ing the solution of political problems 
 within the immediate purview of the 
 Socialist struggle of to-day. On the 
 other hand, a treatise on abstract econo- 
 mics, furnished with a complete appar- 
 atus of statistics, would have been more 
 congenial to another class of mind. 
 Nevertheless, a continuous sketch of 
 
 2fl2Qd7 
 
vi SOCIALISM 
 
 the development of history in relation 
 to Socialism, even as slight as it is here, 
 should have its value if efficiently done. 
 Our plan also necessarily deals with 
 the aspirations of Socialists now living, 
 toward the society of the future. 
 
 We have only further to add that the 
 work has been in the true sense of the 
 word a collaboration, each sentence hav- 
 ing been carefully considered by both 
 the authors in common, although now 
 one, now the other, has had more to 
 do with initial suggestions in different 
 portions of the work. 
 
 W. M. 
 E. B. B. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Preface . 
 Introduction 
 
 Chap. 
 
 i Ancient Society .... 19 
 ii The First Historical or Ancient 
 
 Society . . . . .32 
 
 iii The Transition from the Classical to 
 
 the Mediaeval Period . . 48 
 iv Mediaeval Society : Early Period . 60 
 v The Rough Side of the Middle Ages 76 
 vi The End of the Middle Ages . .85 
 vii The Renaissance and the Reforma- 
 tion 93 
 
 viii Modern Society : Early Stages . 104 
 
 ix Preparations for Revolution : Eng- 
 land . . . . .114 
 x Preparations for Revolution : France 124 
 xi The French Revolution : Constitu- 
 tional Stage . . . 1 36 
 
 Page 
 v 
 
viii SOCIALISM 
 
 Chap. Page 
 xii The French Revolution : The Pro- 
 letarian Stage . . . .147 
 xiii The Industrial Revolution in Eng- 
 land . . . . 159 
 xiv Political Movements in England . 174 
 xv Reaction and Revolution on the Con- 
 tinent 188 
 
 xvi The Paris Commune of 1871, and 
 the Continental Movement fol- 
 lowing it . . . . .196 
 xvii The Utopists : Owen, Saint Simon, 
 
 and Fourier .... 206 
 xviii The Transition from the Utopists to 
 
 Modern Socialism . . .218 
 
 xix Scientific Socialism : Karl Marx . 230 
 
 xx Socialism Militant .... 268 
 
 xxi Socialism Triumphant . . . 287 
 
 Note on the " City " . . . 323 
 
 Index . . . . . .329 
 
SOCIALISM 
 
 ITS GROWTH AND OUTCOME 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 TN one of Edgar Allen Poe's tales he 
 recounts how a little group of wrecked 
 seafarers on a water-logged vessel, at the 
 last extremity of starvation, are suddenly 
 made delirious with joy at seeing a sail 
 approaching them. As she came near them 
 she seemed to be managed strangely and 
 unseamanly as though she were scarcely 
 steered at all, but come near she did, and 
 their joy was too great for them to think 
 much of this anomaly. At last they saw 
 the seamen on board of her, and noted 
 one in the bows especially who seemed to 
 be looking at them with great curiosity, 
 nodding also as though encouraging them 
 to have patience, and smiling at them 
 constantly, showing while he did so a set 
 
 B 
 
2 SOCIALISM 
 
 of very white teeth, and apparently so 
 anxious for their safety that he did not 
 notice that the red cap that he had on 
 his head was falling into the water. 
 
 All of a sudden, as the vessel neared 
 them, and while their hearts were leaping 
 with joy at their now certain deliverance, 
 an inconceivable and horrible stench was 
 wafted to them across the waters, and 
 presently to their horror and misery they 
 saw that this was a ship of the dead, 
 the bowing man was a tottering corpse, 
 his red cap a piece of his flesh torn from 
 him by a sea -fowl ; his amicable smile 
 was caused by his jaws, denuded of the 
 flesh, showing his white teeth set in a 
 perpetual grin. So passed the ship of 
 the dead into the landless ocean, leaving 
 the poor wretches to their despair. 
 
 To us Socialists this Ship of the Dead 
 is an image of the civilisation of our 
 epoch, as the cast-away mariners are of 
 the hopes of the humanity entangled in 
 it. The cheerfully bowing man, whose 
 signs of encouragement and good-feeling 
 turn out to be the results of death and 
 corruption, well betokens to us the much 
 be-praised philanthropy of the rich and 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 refined classes of our Society, which is 
 born of the misery necessary to their very 
 existence. How do people note eagerly, 
 like Arthur Gordon Pym and his luckless 
 fellows, the beautiful hope of the soften- 
 ing of life by the cultivation of good 
 feeling, kindness, and gratitude between 
 rich and poor, with its external manifesta- 
 tions ; its missionary enterprises at home 
 and abroad — hospitals, churches, refuges, 
 and the like; its hard-working clergy 
 dwelling amidst the wretched homes of 
 those whose souls they are saving ; its 
 elegant and enthusiastic ladies sometimes 
 visiting them ; its dignified, cultivated 
 gentlemen from the universities spreading 
 the influences of a refined home in every 
 dull half-starved parish in England ; the 
 thoughtful series of lectures on that 
 virtue of thrift which the poor can 
 scarcely fail to practise even unpreached 
 to ; its increasing sense of the value ot 
 moral purity among those whose sur- 
 roundings forbid them to understand even 
 the meaning of physical purity ; its scent 
 of indecency in Literature and Art, which 
 would prevent the publication of any 
 book written out of England or before 
 
4 SOCIALISM 
 
 the middle of the 19th century, and 
 would reduce painting and sculpture to 
 the production of petticoated dolls without 
 bodies. All this, which seems so refined 
 and humane, is but the effect of the dis- 
 tant view of the fleshless grinning skull 
 of civilisation seeming to offer an escape 
 to the helpless castaways, but destined 
 on its nearer approach to suffocate them 
 with the stench of its corruption, and 
 then to vanish aimlessly into the void, 
 leaving them weltering on the ocean of 
 life which its false hope has rendered more 
 dreadful than before. 
 
 Let us then go through some of 
 the forms through which this universal 
 hypocrisy of modern society, which is 
 its special characteristic, manifests itself. 
 Our present family of blood relationship, 
 based on assumed absolute monogamy, 
 recognises feeble responsibility outside 
 itself, and professes to regulate the de- 
 grees of affection to be felt between 
 different persons according to the amount 
 of kinship between them, so that, for 
 instance, the brotherhood of blood would 
 almost extinguish the sense of duty in 
 that other brotherhood of inclination or 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 of mutual tastes and pursuits, and in fact 
 scarce admit that such ties could be real. 
 Or again, in cases when, as sometimes 
 happens, the sham blood family is broken 
 into by the adoption of a strange child, 
 the proceeding is cloaked by change of 
 name, assumption of mystery, and abund- 
 ance of unconscious ceremonial ; and all 
 this time, though doubtless there are 
 plenty of examples of disinterested affec- 
 tion between the members of a family, 
 as between those outside of it, yet the 
 rule is, and our satirists are never tired of 
 playing on this string, that though to a 
 certain extent the bond of obligation is 
 felt, it is burdensome none the less, and is 
 utterly powerless to prevent the wrangling 
 and hatred caused by the clashing of the 
 discordant dispositions of persons doomed 
 always to pose before the world as special 
 friends. Another point to be noticed is 
 the different way in which family bonds 
 are looked upon amidst different nations 
 even in the circle of modern Europe. 
 In England it is true, as we have said, 
 that all virtue, honour, and affection are 
 supposed to be embraced within the pale 
 of the family ; this superstition is by no 
 
6 SOCIALISM 
 
 means so strong in France : nevertheless 
 there is a conventional bond, there, ap- 
 parently a survival of the tyranny of 
 the civil law of the Roman Empire, 
 that is much stronger than any family 
 tie in England. The family council is 
 submitted to by all Frenchmen and 
 Frenchwomen as a piece of unwritten law 
 which is inexpugnable : a Frenchman 
 cannot marry without leave of his parents 
 before the age of twenty-five ; the rela- 
 tionship of mother and child, which 
 with all exaggerations is more or less 
 natural in England, is almost sacerdotal 
 in France, and is illuminated by a curious 
 kind of conventional sentiment in litera- 
 ture, which sometimes fairly degrades 
 for the time even the greatest authors 
 into the rank of twaddlers. We do not 
 say that a certain amount of sentiment 
 bred by the family system is not genuine : 
 it is reasonable to feel tenderness for 
 the persons who have taken the pains and 
 trouble of cherishing us in our help- 
 lessness, and to wish to pay them back 
 with some little kindness when we no 
 longer need that care, even when time 
 has shown us to have no special sympathy 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 for them : not unreasonable too to look 
 with some special sentiment on brothers 
 and sisters, even when manhood has 
 drifted them awav from our lives and 
 
 J 
 
 their aspirations, since in years past we 
 were living with them in such familiarity 
 when they and we were innocent and 
 undeveloped. But what relation does 
 this light and easv yoke of sentiment bear 
 to the iron chain of conventional sham 
 duty which all of us, even the boldest, 
 are oppressed by so sorely : a chain too 
 that is broken amidst various circum- 
 stances of real and conventional disgrace 
 whenever necessity, as to-day understood, 
 that is, commercial necessity, compels 
 it ? In short, the family professes to exist 
 as affording us a haven of calm and restful 
 affection and the humanising influences 
 of mutual help and consideration, but it 
 ignores quietly its real reason for exist- 
 ence, its real aim, namely, protection for 
 individualist property by means of in- 
 heritance, and a nucleus for resistance to 
 the outside world, whether that take the 
 form of other families or the public weal, 
 such as it may be. 
 
 But this shows after all but the best 
 
8 SOCIALISM 
 
 side of the modern conventional family, 
 as it works in the middle classes. In the 
 lower classes, where the family of blood- 
 relationship might afford some real pro- 
 tection and help to its members, it is 
 completely broken up by the action of 
 the factory system, under which father, 
 mother, brothers, sisters, husband, and 
 wife, compete against each other in the 
 labour market, the end of which is to 
 provide a profit for the capitalist em- 
 ployer ; and this " family," which as now 
 constituted exists for middle-class needs, 
 being useless to the working-classes, they 
 have nothing to turn to to supply the 
 lack of a true social unit. 
 
 To most men it will be more obvious 
 that similar charges may be brought 
 against the religion of modern society : 
 most intelligent persons will allow that 
 it means nothing more than mere sets of 
 names and formulas, to one or other of 
 which every reputable man is supposed 
 to be attached ; in one or other of which 
 he will be sure to find a conventional solu- 
 tion of the great problem of the universe, 
 including our life and its aspirations. If 
 he fails in his duty to society in this 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 respect he suffers accordingly ; and in- 
 deed few men of any position are bold 
 enough to avow that they are outside all 
 such systems of ecclesiasticism ; the very- 
 unorthodox must belong to some acknow- 
 ledged party— they must be orthodox 
 in their unorthodoxy. But as a fact the 
 greater part of cultivated men dare not 
 go so far as that, and are contented with 
 letting society in general feel happy in 
 believing that they subscribe to the 
 general grimace of religion that has 
 taken the place of the real belief, not as 
 yet become a superstition, which allowed 
 practice to be deduced from its solid 
 dream. 
 
 Meanwhile it is common, and especially 
 in the more reactionary circles, to find 
 men who privately admit a cynicism 
 that to their minds relieves them from 
 any ethical responsibility, while in public 
 they keep up the farce of supporting a 
 religion that at least professes to have 
 an ethic of its own. 
 
 Yet even now it is necessary that a 
 certain code of morality should be sup- 
 posed to exist and to have some relation 
 to the religion which, being the creation 
 
io SOCIALISM 
 
 of another age, has now become a sham. 
 With this sham moreover its accompany- 
 ing morality is also steeped, although it has 
 a use as serving for a cover of a morality 
 really the birth of the present condition 
 of things, and this is clung to with 
 a determination or even ferocity natural 
 enough, since its aim is the perpetuation 
 of individual property in wealth, in work- 
 man, in wife, in child. 
 
 The so-called morality of the present 
 age is simply commercial necessity, mas- 
 querading in the forms of the Christian 
 ethics : for instance, commercial honour 
 is merely the code necessitated by the 
 needs of men in commercial relations 
 which without it could not subsist, and 
 which has aufond nothing in common with 
 the Christian " do unto others as thou 
 wouldst," etc., maxim, in the name of 
 which it is on occasion invoked. The 
 only connection that current commercial 
 ethics has with the Christian is, as we said 
 above, a purely formal one. The mystical 
 individualist ethics of Christianity, which 
 had for its supreme end another world 
 and spiritual salvation therein, has been 
 transformed into an individualist ethic 
 
INTRODUCTION u 
 
 having for its supreme end (tacitly, if 
 not avowedly), the material salvation of 
 the individual in the commercial battle 
 of this world. This is illustrated by a 
 predominance amongst the commercial 
 classes of a debased Calvinistic theology, 
 termed Evangelicalism, 1 which is the only 
 form of religion these classes can under- 
 stand — the poetico- mystical element in 
 the earlier Christianity being eliminated 
 therefrom, and the " natural laws " of profit 
 and loss, and the devil take the hind- 
 most, which dominate this carnal world, 
 being as nearly as possible reproduced 
 into the spiritual world of its conception. 
 It may surprise some to be told that 
 politics share this unreality to the full, 
 since it is generally supposed that de- 
 mocracy has at last really triumphed 
 and is now entering into its kingdom. 
 Doubtless the political events of this 
 century have convinced every one that 
 change in the relations of men to each 
 other is at hand ; but before that change 
 can come, it must be understood that the 
 development of the people must be on 
 
 1 If it be said that Evangelicalism is no longer flourishing, 
 that is true in the Church of England ; hut the large and 
 exceedingly influential body of dissenters still remains intact. 
 
12 SOCIALISM 
 
 other lines than politicians now dream of. 
 It is true that political freedom is thought 
 to have been gained, but what is the nature 
 of the gain ? What is the end and aim of 
 that political freedom which all parties in 
 the State profess to be striving to ac- 
 complish ? Once more it is a sham, de- 
 signed really to keep the mass of men 
 helpless and divided, so that they may 
 still be the instruments of the strong and 
 successful. It takes various forms : for 
 example, the land is to be freed from the 
 last remains of feudality and so become 
 more completely a mere portion of profit- 
 breeding capital, thus helping the mon- 
 strous aggregation of riches that is 
 reducing all life to a misery. Parents 
 and parsons are to be free to teach chil- 
 dren what they will, thus depriving the 
 unfortunate creatures of the most neces- 
 sary aids to human development. Trade 
 and manufacture are to be freed from all 
 trammels, so that the mass of the people 
 may be compelled to serve the needs, 
 both as producers and as buyers, of those 
 who have but one object, to sell at a 
 profit. 
 
 For the sustaining of this glorious 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 "freedom," otherwise spoken of as the 
 " sanctity of contract," government by 
 party is a recognised and effective 
 instrument. In this arrangement the 
 members of Parliament are divided into 
 two sides, much as lads about to play a 
 game at football ; the two sides do not 
 differ much in their principles, though 
 there is sometimes a violent faction 
 squabble as to the amount of concession 
 that it is safe to give to or withhold from 
 the demands of the people : not seldom 
 even this difference does not exist — the 
 legislation proposed by both parties is 
 almost identical, and some safe excuse 
 for quarrel has to be sought for before 
 the game can be played. Thus is carried 
 out the crowning sham of modern poli- 
 tics under the absurd title of Repre- 
 sentative Government, and the name of 
 democracy is used to cloak an oligarchy 
 more or less extended, while once more 
 all decent people who may profess an 
 interest in politics are expected to range 
 themselves under one or other of the 
 great political parties, now become 
 almost less than mere names, the very 
 shadows of shadows. 
 
i + SOCIALISM 
 
 When all life, domestic, religious, moral 
 and political, is thus fallen into mere pre- 
 tence, when all these branches of men's 
 energy have come to professing aims 
 which, when they have any, are not their 
 real aims, and on which they will not 
 and cannot act, when they do not know 
 what they really are and are blind to 
 their real destiny, how can it be possible 
 that Art, the expression of the life of 
 society, can be otherwise than a sham 
 also ? Here and there indeed the 
 irrepressible genius of an individual 
 expresses itself by dint of toil and anxiety 
 undreamed of in better days, and pro- 
 duces works of art that are beautiful 
 and powerful, however damaged by the 
 souring effects of a desperate struggle 
 against monstrous surroundings, and by 
 the restlessness that comes of the over- 
 exertion even of great powers. But other- 
 wise the fine arts no longer exist for the 
 feople at large. How could they ? The 
 one reality of modern society is industrial 
 slavery, far-reaching and intimate, su- 
 preme over every man's life, dominating 
 every action of it from the greatest to 
 the least : no man and no set of men 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 can do anything that does not tend 
 towards the support of this slavery unless 
 they act as conscious rebels against it. 
 Men living under such conditions cannot 
 produce social art or architecture (with all 
 that grasp of the decorative cycle of the 
 arts which that word means), or even 
 desire to do so ; they have lost all under- 
 standing of what it is ; the mass of the 
 people have nothing to do with Art archi- 
 tectural except so far as they are compelled 
 to produce the sham of it mechanically 
 as a trade finish to wares, so as to give 
 them a higher marketable value. Space 
 fails us here to contrast this condition of 
 things with that of the epochs that 
 produced Art, or to show the conse- 
 quences of the difference. Suffice it to 
 say once more that, except for the very 
 f^w works produced by men of exceptional 
 genius, which works the general public 
 does not relish or understand in the least, 
 Art is for the most part dormant. 
 
 In this brief review of the various 
 phases of modern life, — its family rela- 
 tions, morality, religion, politics, and 
 art, — the reader who has not yet studied 
 socialism may see nothing but pessimism. 
 
16 SOCIALISM 
 
 For until recently amongst cultivated 
 people, enjoying whatever advantages 
 may be derived from civilisation, there 
 has been an almost universal belief, not 
 yet much broken into, that modern 
 or bourgeois civilisation is the final 
 form of human society. Were this the 
 case we should be pessimists indeed, but 
 happily we know that civilisation is only a 
 stage in the development of the human 
 race, just as barbarism was, or the sav- 
 agery of the progressive nations. Civil- 
 isation must of necessity develop into 
 some other form of society, the tendencies 
 of which we can see, but not the details; 
 for it is now becoming clear that this 
 new state of society can only be reached 
 through the great economic, moral, and 
 political change which we call Socialism ; 
 and the essential foundation of this is the 
 raising of the working classes to a point 
 that gives them a control over their own 
 labour and its product. 
 
 In order that our readers may get a 
 correct view of this, it is necessary to use 
 the historic method — that is to say, to 
 trace the development of society from its 
 early times up to the full expression of 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 the commercial period, which has created 
 and is now creating such a vast mass of 
 discontent, not only amongst the work- 
 ing classes who suffer directly from the 
 oppression that is a necessary part of 
 it, but also in various and sometimes 
 discordant forms amongst the well-to-do, 
 who on the face of things are benefited 
 by its working. We propose to finish 
 the book by giving our own impressions 
 both of the immediate issue of the pre- 
 sent stir and commotion in socio-political 
 life, and also of what may be reasonably 
 expected from the new society when it 
 has at last supplanted the ever-increasing 
 confusion of the present day. Only it 
 must be premised that this last part can 
 be nothing more than the expression of 
 our own individual views, and that we 
 do not claim any further weight for it. 
 Although it has been often attempted, it 
 is impossible to build up a scheme for 
 the society of the future, for no man can 
 really think himself out of his own days ; 
 his palace of days to come can only be 
 constructed from the aspirations forced 
 upon him by his present surroundings, 
 and from his dreams of the life of the 
 
1 8 SOCIALISM 
 
 past, which themselves cannot fail to be 
 more or less unsubstantial imaginings. 
 
 At least we can boldly assert that those 
 who think that the civilisation of our 
 own time will not be transformed both in 
 shape and in essence, hold their opinion 
 in the teeth of the witness of all history. 
 This cannot be set aside by taking refuge 
 in platitudes about " human nature," 
 which are really deduced from orthodox 
 theology and an obsolete view of history. 
 Human nature is itself a growth of the 
 ages, and is ever and indefinitely moulded 
 by the conditions under which it finds 
 itself. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 [T is, or has been, a commonplace with 
 many that the system of to-day has 
 been made by the growth of ages, and 
 that our wills in the present are impotent 
 to change it : but those who put this 
 forward from their position of " standing 
 on the ancient ways," fail to see that this 
 very fact condemns that position. The 
 business of progressive minds is to 
 recognise the coming change, to clear 
 away obstacles to it, to accept it, and 
 to organise it in detail. Reactionists, 
 however, although they deny it and pro- 
 fess to accept moderate, i.e. non-essential 
 change, are trying consciously to stay that 
 very evolution at the point which it has 
 
20 SOCIALISM 
 
 reached to-day : they are attempting to 
 turn the transient into the eternal : there- 
 fore by persistently reading the spirit of 
 the present into the records of the past, 
 they really annihilate history, which is 
 not a mere series of actual events through 
 which society, crystallised at once and 
 for ever as to its essentials in the form 
 that it assumes now, has cut its way, 
 but is really one with the present society 
 of which we are ourselves a part ; is 
 in fact society as regarded from its 
 dynamic aspect, as the agent and patient 
 of change. The 18th century view of 
 history was entirely based on the above- 
 mentioned narrowness of conception, 1 
 which forced men to look on " Homer " 
 as a literary man, like, say Dryden and 
 Pope, and on Lycurgus as an early Dr. 
 Johnson. 
 
 The hopes for the social life of the 
 future are involved in its struggles in the 
 past ; which indeed, since they have 
 
 1 It is curious to note how this view has acted on a man 
 of such insight and such capacity for research as the late 
 Lewis H. Morgan, who seeks the American democratic con- 
 stitution in the beginnings of social evolution, alike in the 
 Iroquois tribe, in the Greek 7r6\c5, and in the Roman city of 
 the regal period. 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 21 
 
 built up the present system, and created 
 us out of its conflict towards fresh change, 
 have really forced us, whether we will it 
 or not, into our present position of seek- 
 ing still further change. 
 
 Modern civilised society has been 
 developed by the antagonism between in- 
 dividual and social interests, between the 
 holding of property in severalty and in 
 common ; and between the simple and 
 limited kinship group, and the complex 
 and extended political whole, or imper- 
 sonal state, which has transformed primi- 
 tive society into civilisation. 
 
 The difference between these opposing 
 circumstances of society is, in fact, that 
 between an organism and a mechanism. 
 The earlier condition in which every- 
 thing, art, science (so far as it went), 
 law, industry, were personal, and aspects 
 of a living body, is opposed to the civil- 
 ised condition in which all these elements 
 have become mechanical, uniting to build 
 up mechanical life, and themselves the 
 product of machines material and moral. 
 
 That all our industry and art is pro- 
 duced by a system of machinery is a fact 
 too obvious to need enlarging on in this 
 
22 SOCIALISM 
 
 place. 1 But it may not be so clear to 
 many that the system is dominant over 
 other departments of human life ; for 
 instance, the blood-feud and the weregild 
 were the foundation of early or " cus- 
 tomary " criminal law : the penalty 
 of the offender being rather negative than 
 positive. In customary law the protec- 
 tion of society was withdrawn from the 
 offender : in political law, society itself 
 delegates certain men, who, without 
 having any personal or social relations to 
 the criminal or his victim, have to under- 
 take his punishment , that is, to injure him 
 by a mechanical procedure, so that the 
 offender, instead of being a person excluded 
 from the benefits of society, and merely 
 ignored by it, has become an enemy with 
 whose destruction, or existence in a muti- 
 lated condition society must charge itself. 
 The machine of criminal law is first 
 set in motion by the police : the judge 
 gives the law to the jury as a hard and 
 fast mechanical rule, on that rule the 
 verdict is given by the jury, the prisoner 
 is sentenced by the judge by the same 
 
 1 It has, moreover, often been dwelt upon by the present 
 writers. 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 23 
 
 method, and is handed over after sen- 
 tence to the jailor, who in his turn has 
 to torture him by prescribed mechanical 
 process, knowing maybe nothing of his 
 crime or his history, distinguishing him 
 from his fellow-prisoners not by a name 
 but by a number. 
 
 The same thing clearly applies to 
 civil procedure, which is, if anything, of 
 a still more routine character. It guards 
 wealth, not as wealth, but as property 
 only. Thus when it has to deal with 
 the case of a lunatic, its interest lies in 
 preserving his estate while the dealings 
 with his person are put in another and 
 subsidiary category. The difference be- 
 tween this machine law, and the arbitra- 
 tion, according to customary usage, of 
 the chief, or primus inter pares, is suffi- 
 ciently obvious. 
 
 It must now be admitted that no 
 traces exist of any race of mankind liv- 
 ing otherwise than in a society of some 
 kind or other ; the few examples, in 
 which this was supposed to be the 
 case, proving to be instances not 
 of survival but of degradation. This 
 primitive society at the lowest stage 
 
24 SOCIALISM 
 
 discoverable had little knowledge of 
 tools even when co-operation in matters 
 of detail was considerably advanced. 
 An instance may be given in the act of 
 cultivation before the invention of the 
 spade, where a gang of tillers thrust 
 mere stout sticks into a ridge of earth, 
 and by means of a combined heave 
 turned the soil over. Indeed labour, as 
 far as it went, was, under the conditions 
 of the mere nomadic horde, co-operative. 
 But the beginnings of a greater power 
 over nature, mainly brought about by 
 an advance in the co-operation of labour, 
 produced a more complex form of 
 society, which is the first society of 
 which we have any definite knowledge. 
 The land began to be accepted as the 
 source of the wealth of the community, 
 and as such, whether for pasture or 
 tillage, was recognised as the definite 
 property of the community as against 
 other communities. The right of the 
 individual holding (as opposed to owner- 
 ship) of Property was based entirely on 
 use, so that there was none that was not 
 common, except the man's personal gear, 
 such as clothes, arms, and the like ; this 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 25 
 
 is illustrated by the primitive customs 
 which at first sight seems to contradict 
 it, of the interment of the warrior's arms, 
 etc., with him, for these were so buried 
 because they were supposed to be 
 necessary for his use in the continuous 
 life which he was to lead in the land 
 of shadows. 
 
 This primitive community took the 
 form of a narrow and exclusive group 
 based on the kinship, real or supposed, 
 of its members. The three integral 
 bodies in this society are the Gens, the 
 Tribe, and the jjeoS or People. The 
 Gens is a group founded on actual 
 blood relationship, in which inter- 
 marriage is forbidden ; it cannot exist 
 separately therefore, but must have 
 another Gens for its complement : thus, 
 since no " Eagle " man can have sexual 
 intercourse with an "Eagle" woman, there 
 is at hand a "Wolf-gens for inter- 
 marriage. 
 
 These Gentes have a tendency to 
 coalesce and form the Tribe, in which 
 kinship is still supposed, but is not 
 necessarily actual ; as time goes on, the 
 Gentes tend to lose their autonomous 
 
26 SOCIALISM 
 
 existence in the Tribe ; but the Tribe in 
 its turn tends to merge itself into 
 a higher unity, the ]>eoS or People, 
 which is a federation of tribes, and in 
 which the formal traditional kinship 
 is in general merely mythical. 
 
 The opinion first put forward by 
 Bachofen is now commonly held, that, at 
 first, descent in the Gens was traced 
 wholly through the mother, and that 
 consequently the women were the recog- 
 nised predominant element therein, the 
 stock historical instance being that of the 
 Lycians, as mentioned by Herodotus. 
 
 Among the Oriental Races at this 
 period the patriarchal family had tended 
 to supersede the Gens as the unit of 
 social life. In Europe something the 
 same in essence, but modified in form, 
 grew up as the Roman Familia, of which 
 we shall treat later on. It may be added 
 that the existing conditions of life among 
 the Bedouins in Arabia seem to show a 
 curious blending of patriarchal society 
 with that of the Gens and the Tribe. For 
 the rest the primitive Patriarchal family, 
 generally speaking, arose from the privi- 
 lege of primacy of sexual intercourse held 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 27 
 
 by the elder brother of the Gens. This is 
 indicated, amongst other things, by the 
 custom known as the Levirate, " the rais- 
 ing up seed to the brother," mentioned 
 in Genesis and in the Gospels. The last 
 survival of it was the jus prima e noctis 
 of mediaeval customary law, and its ac- 
 companying tenure of Borough English. 
 It was along this line that patriarchal 
 property - polygamy developed, and at 
 last the modern monogamous family. 
 
 These groups above mentioned, whether 
 People, Tribe, or Gens, were essentially 
 exclusive ; within their limits peace and 
 community of property was the rule — 
 without, a state of war was assumed ; it 
 was not war that had to be declared, but 
 peace ; the market, for instance, was 
 originally held on the neutral zone 
 between two social groups, where they 
 could meet to exchange commodities. 1 
 
 The continuous wars which resulted 
 from this condition of things necessarily 
 produced slavery. This slavery was of 
 two kinds more or less distinct from one 
 another. A migratory tribe or people, 
 in conquering a settled population, 
 
 1 Cf. Sir Henry Maine, Village Communities. 
 
28 SOCIALISM 
 
 after the fighting was over, allowed 
 the vanquished to live on a portion 
 of the conquered lands, on the con- 
 ditions of rendering service to their 
 lords ; they were the serfs of their 
 conquerors. 
 
 Frequent raids by the gentes or clans 
 on each other produced another kind of 
 slaves : the captives taken in battle 
 ceased to be slain on the field, as soon 
 as the captors found out that they could 
 be used for labour which produced 
 more than their bare subsistence : this 
 was the origin of the Chattel Slave, who 
 was the actual property of the conquering 
 group, as the horses or oxen were. 
 
 The head of the kinship society, by 
 virtue of his position as representative of 
 the original ancestor, was the custodian 
 of its wealth, and its leader in battle. 
 But the frequency of wars often made 
 other leaders necessary besides this 
 hereditary chief, and these naturally 
 began to have predominance over the un- 
 distinguished kinsmen. Meantime the 
 power of production was ever on the 
 increase : stone tools gave place first to 
 bronze, and then to iron. The nomad 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 29 
 
 tribes began to settle when they dis- 
 covered the art of producing grain from 
 the original wild grasses, and supplemented 
 their milk and flesh diet with meal and 
 bread ; wealth began to increase beyond 
 the immediate needs of a limited popula- 
 tion amidst limitless natural resources. 
 
 Since therefore there was an excess of 
 wealth over bare necessity, its distribution 
 began to be unequal, and the hereditary 
 and elected leaders were allowed to con- 
 sume more than the general average of 
 that wealth, and class society began to 
 appear, its first representatives being the 
 chief and his immediate household. 
 
 By this time the older nomadic tribes 
 had turned into settled communities 
 living in villages, and surrounded by 
 tillage, the whole enclosed by a stockade. 
 In mountainous or hilly countries this 
 was dominated by a fortress on an eleva- 
 tion, called the Bury or Burg. And in 
 this burg and stockaded village we have 
 the first element of the City. 
 
 The religion of Barbarism was ancestor- 
 worship coupled with universal animism, 
 — that is to say, the conception of every 
 thing in the world, animate and inanimate, 
 
3 o SOCIALISM 
 
 as a being endowed with human will and 
 consciousness. The meeting point of 
 these two elements of barbaric religion 
 was the totem of the group, which was 
 usually an animal or plant to which 
 special religious honours were paid, and 
 which was something more than a mere 
 symbol of the ancestor, and was in fact 
 looked upon almost as being the ancestor 
 himself. It is the more difficult for us 
 moderns to conceive of the state of mind 
 that produced this notion, because we are 
 so much further removed from nature than 
 was primitive man ; the development 
 of the faculty of reflection has blunted 
 the intuition of the senses, so that much 
 that was assumed as real by early man 
 has become preposterously inconceivable 
 to us, though it seems as if there were 
 examples of the survival in children of 
 their near relation to nature, for some of 
 them certainly accept their pets, toys, 
 etc., as companions of a similar living 
 race to themselves. 
 
 We would say here that some anthrop- 
 ologists, in drawing analogies between the 
 condition of the present savage races and 
 that of the ancestors of the progressive 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 31 
 
 races, seem to us to be too confident in 
 accepting those conditions as being 
 identical. May it not be possible that 
 there is an essential difference between 
 the savage peoples of to-day and the 
 early historical races ; a difference which 
 forbids the former to develop beyond a 
 condition of savagery, and that therefore 
 these historical races have never passed 
 through a state of society precisely 
 identical with those of the modern 
 savage ? 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE FIRST HISTORICAL OR 
 ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 A NCIENT barbarism developed natur- 
 ally into Ancient Civilisation, which, 
 as the name implies, took the form of city 
 life. This development was furthered 
 by the fact that, when the tribes began 
 to settle, those dwellings throve most 
 which were naturally protected by the 
 lie of the land, so that the anxiety for 
 the safeguarding of the wealth of the 
 community was not constantly pressing. 
 And these best protected and conse- 
 quently most thriving places became 
 the nuclei of the great cities of an- 
 tiquity, such as Memphis, Thebes, 
 Babylon, Jerusalem, Corinth, Athens, 
 Rome, etc. Babylon, by the way, if the 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 33 
 
 accepted measurements of its walls are 
 anywhere near correctness, seems to have 
 been rather a walled-round district than 
 what we should now call a city, and may 
 therefore be considered a very direct 
 development from the stockaded home- 
 field of the tribal group. 
 
 As the tribe or people settled, there 
 was a tendency towards a further de- 
 velopment of the cultus of the ancestor, 
 which gradually fixed his imagined deeds 
 and tomb in a certain locality. The 
 sanctity of this place made it the centre 
 of the life of the community, and the 
 members of the groups, which were now 
 increasing in numbers, flocked to it for 
 common worship and intercourse, as 
 well as for protection. This greater cen- 
 tralisation tended to obscure the lesser 
 centres (the clan, tribe, etc.), and at last 
 left them rudimentary, mere local names, 
 sometimes with religious rites attached to 
 them. 1 
 
 The arts of building which began with 
 
 1 The great Epos of Troy, in which the Holy City plays 
 such a central and predominating part, is a good illustration 
 of this growth of the burg into the city, and it may be noted 
 that the Holy City was the centre of the Hellenes of Asia, 
 where civilisation was more advanced, whereas their ruder 
 
 D 
 
34 SOCIALISM 
 
 the settlement of the tribe, and which 
 were used in completing the raising of 
 the burg and the walling of the common 
 homestead, now received further impetus 
 from being used for the great temple of 
 the eponomous ancestor (that is, the origi- 
 nal father of the tribe, real or supposed) of 
 the whole community, in which each clan 
 (of the >eoS) had its own shrine or chapel 
 dedicated to its own special ancestor. 
 
 By the time this was accomplished 
 the city was the one unit of life and 
 centre of worship, and of the group- 
 organisations, the lands of the com- 
 munity surrounding it being the property 
 of those clans, and exploited by them for 
 their livelihood, while their social and 
 religious home was in the city itself. 
 
 But in the city social was being fast 
 transformed into political life by the 
 destruction of the independence of the 
 ancient groups, and the dying out of 
 real personal relations between their 
 members ; for this was accompanied by 
 the change in the ownership of land 
 
 European brethren felt themselves the enemy of the new 
 development, just as in England the incoming Teutonic 
 f)eof5 fell on the Roman cities then existing, which, when 
 conquered, they could make no use of, but merely destroyed. 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 35 
 
 which now made the citizen a represent- 
 ative and possessor of a portion of the 
 city territory ; whereas heretofore the 
 land was an affix to the social group, 
 the individual member of which enjoyed 
 its advantages simply as a member of 
 that corporation. 1 In short, in the earlier 
 times the land belonged to the group ; 
 now the individual belonged to the land. 
 Accompanying this change there took 
 place a development of the market, which 
 before this centralisation was infrequent 
 and spasmodic, depending on periods of 
 truce between warring tribes, but which 
 now became a regular and settled insti- 
 tution under the protection of the burg 
 and its citizens, and was thus one of the 
 chief elements in the growth of the 
 importance and power of the cities. And 
 the communication between different 
 districts and countries which this settled 
 and protected market set on foot, also 
 tended to the federation of the cities, 
 
 1 It is worth while noting, as showing that there are yet 
 left definite survivals of tribal life, that one of the incidents 
 in the recent anti-Christian movement in China was a solemn 
 proclamation from certain of the tribes calling on another 
 tribe much infected by Christianity to purge itself of the 
 offence by expelling the offending members if they proved to 
 be obstinate. 
 
36 SOCIALISM 
 
 which was one of the leading ideas of 
 the ancient historical period. 
 
 Slavery of the chattel kind now grew 
 rapidly, with the result that the usufruct 
 of the land became much more valuable, 
 as raw material was worked up by the 
 constant labour of slaves into marketable 
 wares. This growing wealth created a 
 narrow aristocracy, the members of 
 which were the freemen of the old clans. 
 These were imbedded in a population 
 composed to a great degree of slaves as 
 aforesaid, but also of men who, though 
 not in a servile condition, did not share 
 in the privileges of the original kinship 
 and founders of the city. These were 
 the fragments of broken-up clans of the 
 neighbouring country, or emancipated 
 slaves who had drifted towards the 
 paramount city. The great historical 
 instance of this is the story of the 
 Roman plebs, which, it must be remem- 
 bered, is not an accident peculiar to 
 Roman society, but was going on at 
 various periods throughout the whole 
 of inchoate ancient civilisation, and 
 also in the Teutonic countries of Early 
 Mediaeval Europe. 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 37 
 
 We believe that this, or something 
 like it, was the origin and condition 
 of all the great cities of antiquity, alike 
 of the great oriental empires, Egypt 
 included, and of the Greek and Italian 
 communities. As for the empires of 
 the East they were originally only 
 federations of great cities, just as the 
 cities themselves originated in federa- 
 tions of clans and tribes. The semi- 
 godlike position of the king in these 
 empires was doubtless a recurrence of 
 the worship of the tribal ancestor, now 
 transferred to the embodied symbol of 
 the collective ancestor-worship of the 
 federation. As the progressive races 
 issue from the prehistoric times, we find 
 them segregated into four great sections, 
 or civilisations, the first and most im- 
 portant dwelling in the valley of the 
 Tigris and Euphrates ; the next in im- 
 portance in the valley of the Nile ; the 
 third on the Yang-tsze-kiang ; and the 
 fourth on the Ganges. 
 
 At a later period, when the energies 
 of the progressive races required fresh 
 developments, the shores of the eastern 
 portion of the Mediterranean were 
 
 20294'? 
 
38 SOCIALISM 
 
 peopled by the most adventurous and 
 most progressive of those races, to whom 
 we will now turn as affording the most 
 typical instances of the development of 
 city life, and as those of whom we have 
 the most definite information. 
 
 With the period of the Homeric 
 poems this civilisation of the classical 
 peoples emerges from its prehistoric 
 beginnings. In the literature of this 
 period there are few indications on the 
 surface of the barbaric group -society, 
 although search reveals at least some of 
 these, amongst which may be mentioned 
 the account in the Iliad of the house- 
 hold of Priam, which seems to have 
 been a complete and recognised Gens. 
 Again, the end of the Odyssey, which 
 appears from the modern literary point 
 of view such a purposeless anti-climax, 
 was once a history that the rhapsodist 
 could not possibly evade, of the blood- 
 feud after the suitors, the slaying of 
 whom, according to modern ideas of 
 ancient manners, was a perfectly justifi- 
 able homicide. But in an earlier society 
 it was not crime that had to be punished, 
 but a tribal injury, which had to be atoned 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 39 
 
 for either by blood or the price of blood. 
 Whatever the merits of the quarrel might 
 have been, the ethics of kinship would 
 compel the Gentes, to whom the slain 
 men belonged, to follow up the feud to 
 appeasement, which even in the present 
 state of the text takes place in the Odyssey. 
 The remains of so-called cities, as at 
 Mycenae and Tyryns, turn out on investi- 
 gation to have been the dwelling of the 
 chieftain of the clan, or the burg, that 
 is to say, the germ of the city of civilisa- 
 tion. The two typical forms of this 
 city which went through a long develop- 
 ment, very obscure at certain stages, are 
 Lacedaemon and Athens. The former 
 retained in its constitution a great part 
 of the communal organisation, and even 
 habits of the group-society, out of which 
 it had grown. This is shown on one hand 
 by the common dinner of the freemen, 
 and the general tendency of the Lycur- 
 gan legislation, some of the instances of 
 which have been so curiously misunder- 
 stood by later exponents, who saw in 
 them mere artificial and arbitrary regu- 
 lations having the conscious end of sus- 
 taining the warlike spirit of the citizens, 
 
40 SOCIALISM 
 
 instead of being, as they were, survivals 
 crystallised from the early stage of 
 development. An obvious example is 
 the well-known story of the boy who 
 had stolen the fox, which is given as an 
 illustration of the Lycurgan law which 
 legalised theft if done with formal 
 secrecy, a law which was felt as so 
 directly opposed to the more modern 
 institution of private property that it 
 needed a euhemeristic explanation, which 
 of course has no foundation in fact. 
 
 In Athens the change was much more 
 radical, the idea which wielded it much 
 more thoroughly new : it involved the 
 complete transformation of the personal 
 relationship of the free men into a politi- 
 cal society. 
 
 But in the revolution which bears 
 the names of Solon and Kleisthenes, the 
 group-society had, first of all, become 
 thoroughly corrupted ; since the old 
 Gentes had grown to be close corpora- 
 tions amidst a disorganised society of free 
 men who did not share in their privileges, 
 and who were economically oppressed by 
 the outrageous and bald system of usury 
 practised by the privileged. In Sparta, 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 41 
 
 as above said, the old gentile Community 
 retained a great amount of vitality, even 
 amidst the new political order. 
 
 It may be remembered, by the way, 
 that the earlier stages of a new social 
 development always show the character- 
 istic evils of the incoming system, not 
 perhaps in their really worst, but, at least, 
 in their most direct and obvious form. 
 For instance, in all early civilised Com- 
 munities (recently emerged from group- 
 organisations) usury and litigation are 
 rampant, as, amongst other instances, the 
 elaborate account of the life of the time 
 given in the Icelandic sagas shows us. 
 Again, the earlier days of the great 
 capitalistic industries give us examples, 
 worse on the surface, of the /cynical 
 brutality which is an essential of 
 Capitalism, than any that are current 
 to-day, although the present evils reach 
 both deeper and wider than they did in 
 its beginnings, and for that very reason 
 are more irremediable under the system. 1 
 
 1 As for instance the actual chattel-slavery of the work- 
 house children consigned to the manufacturers of the northern 
 towns, and their torture to keep them awake during the 
 monstrous duration of the hours of labour, that obtained 
 before the passing of the Factory Act. 
 
42 SOCIALISM 
 
 As the change took place at Athens, 
 then, the old Gentes were entirely broken 
 up, except for certain ceremonial and 
 religious purposes, and the free citizens 
 were placed on the lands on certain 
 localities of the territory without any 
 topographical relation to their former 
 position in the kinship clans. Except 
 for the purposes of a few ritual usages, 
 property in severalty took the place of 
 corporate ownership, and the society of 
 the ancient historical city was thus 
 rendered complete as to its essentials : the 
 federations of the cities so formed, such as 
 the Doric and Ionian confederacies, had 
 no tendency to consolidate into empires as 
 in the East, but remained true federations, 
 the units of which were still sovereign 
 cities, and which developed no overlord 
 destined to grow gradually into the des- 
 potic head of a quasi-bureaucratic system. 1 
 
 The development of the native 
 Italian cities, as distinguished from 
 Greek colonies in Italy, was not in any 
 essential respect different from that of 
 
 1 The Tyrannies cannot be considered as a development of 
 city life but rather as sporadic disease of its corruption j and 
 seldom covered more than a single city. 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 43 
 
 Athens, which may be regarded as the 
 general type of the ancient classical city 
 apart from the Dorian developments, 
 which always retained some show of the 
 ancient survivals. 
 
 In Rome, the most historically im- 
 portant of the native Italian cities, the 
 very same resolution took place that we 
 have described as to Athens. The first 
 instalment of it was embodied in the 
 legislation ascribed to " Servius Tullius," 
 which created the Centuries, political 
 bodies based on the possession of 
 property. These were thrust into the 
 kinship groups, the Curias and tribes, 
 and gradually assimilated the latter to 
 their conditions. The bodies so formed 
 became the free men or burgesses of early 
 historical Rome. The plebs, which 
 originally constituted the unprivileged 
 free men, was thus taken into the politi- 
 cal system and attained a measure of 
 privilege, the struggle for the increase of 
 which forms the staple of Roman history 
 for the next three centuries ; these 
 plebeian citizens at first were in the 
 main the craftsmen of the city ; slave- 
 labour at that period apparently not 
 
44 SOCIALISM 
 
 touching that side of production much. 
 But from the first the idea of conquest 
 was always dominant in the Roman 
 community, so that this organisation of 
 free men was the political side of a system 
 mainly directed towards the upholding of 
 an effective army. This was, of course, 
 conspicuous in early days owing to the 
 necessities of the case ; but in later times 
 the army organisation was the engine by 
 which the plutocratic classes impressed 
 their power on the State. The Equestrian 
 order, as the name implies, was origin- 
 ally the cavalry of the Roman army, 
 composed of the richer citizens, since 
 their equipment was more expensive ; 
 but in later times, when the bureaucracy 
 was being formed, it became little more 
 than a formal title of honour, indicating 
 the possession of riches. 
 
 The Gracchan legislation points to the 
 rise of this plutocracy, and its struggles 
 with the older nobility, the patrician 
 order, which by this time had diminished 
 to a very small part of the population. 
 It became finally dominant in the last 
 days of the republic, and after having 
 produced the chaotic period, during which 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 45 
 
 Roman history is a record of the struggles 
 of great individualities amongst the rich, 
 was reduced to order by the early empire. 
 The latter was a definite and stable 
 bureaucratic system, which was at least 
 so much of an improvement as to make 
 life tolerable for most people. All rights 
 indeed, both political and social, had 
 disappeared, except the rights of property 
 as interpreted by the law courts ; but 
 the lower ranks of society, including the 
 slaves, were decidedly bettered by the 
 change ; while the well-to-do were in a 
 state of material ease unrivalled in the 
 world's history. 
 
 The institutions of marriage and 
 slavery played a great part in the above- 
 mentioned development of society. The 
 group-marriage of the early kinship Com- 
 munities, on the change in the holding of 
 property becoming marked, grew to be 
 superseded by a quasi-monogamy, which 
 was in force at least as early as the 
 Homeric period, though it is clear from 
 that literature that it was personally, apart 
 from the rights of property and succession, 
 a very loose tie, and was supplemented 
 by widespread recognised concubinage. 
 
46 SOCIALISM 
 
 Throughout the whole of the classical 
 period practically the same state of things 
 obtained. But as the republic of Rome 
 drew near to its fall, the monogamic 
 institution was still further weakened, 
 and became little more than a contract 
 dissoluble by will ; and advantage of this 
 fact was commonly taken. In the end, 
 in the later days of the Empire, marriage 
 was looked upon as so irksome that it was 
 little resorted to, its place being supplied 
 by intercourse with the female slaves, 
 with the result that the population began 
 obviously to decrease owing to the non- 
 rearing of children. 
 
 This subject leads naturally to the 
 consideration of the Roman familia, 
 which consisted of wife, children, and 
 slaves, all under the absolute power of 
 the head of the household, or pater- 
 familias ; attached to this family through 
 their relations to the paterfamilias were 
 the clients, who, though not directly 
 under his absolute power, were practi- 
 cally bound to him by economic and 
 social ties, since he was their guardian 
 and their protector generally. The 
 relation of this, amidst all differences, to 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 47 
 
 the kinship group is clear, as well as its 
 demarcation from the polygamic patri- 
 archal family of the East. It must be 
 remembered that the power of life and 
 death, in short of jurisdiction, of the 
 paterfamilias over all the members of 
 the family was real and not merely formal. 
 It will be seen therefore that the mono- 
 gamic family was the lowest unit in 
 classical society, as the Gens was in the 
 early group-society ; and also it must be 
 said that the working of the transforma- 
 tion of personal into political society is 
 very clearly marked by the differences 
 between the classical family and the 
 barbaric Gens, Curia, or Clan. 
 
 The oligarchies which became the 
 masters of this social state, owing to the 
 ambition of their more able members, 
 who found their support in the democ- 
 racies, were self-destructive, and before 
 long gave way to the absolutist power 
 which was the core of them, and their 
 place was taken in the Greek world by 
 the so-called Tyrannies, and in the 
 Roman world by the Empire. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE TRANSITION FROM THE 
 CLASSICAL TO THE MEDI- 
 EVAL PERIOD. 
 
 A NCIENT civilisation used to be 
 "^ considered as the direct parent of 
 modern society, with nothing between 
 them but a chaos of merely negative lapse 
 of time, as is sufficiently indicated by the 
 name given to the latter period — the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 But it is now recognised that this sup- 
 posed chaos had an order of its own, 
 and was an integral and necessary part 
 of the evolution of primitive into modern 
 life. And it may here be said that the 
 close resemblance on many points be- 
 tween the pre-classical period of antiquity, 
 the epoch of the Homeric poems, and the 
 
THE TRANSITION PERIOD 49 
 
 Middle Ages is very noteworthy. We 
 have now to inquire into the transition 
 which brought about the change from 
 the one system to the other. 
 
 First as to the economical side. The 
 classical system of production was founded 
 on chattel-slavery, the mediaeval on serf- 
 dom, and it was the change from the 
 one labour-system to the other which 
 was the special characteristic of the 
 transition. 
 
 Agriculture was the dominating in- 
 dustry of the classical world, and this 
 part of labour was almost entirely the 
 work of chattel-slaves, the property of 
 the great landowners. As long as the 
 Empire was at peace about its great 
 centres, this system went on without 
 serious check, since the servile insurrec- 
 tions belong to the times of civil brawl 
 before the Empire ; though it is true that 
 a reflection of the miseries of the slaves 
 is to be found in the chronic brigandage 
 and piracy that infested ancient civilisa- 
 tion during its whole period. But as 
 the Empire contracted its boundaries, 
 and actual war drew near its centre, 
 while its grasping and corrupt tax 
 
 E 
 
50 SOCIALISM 
 
 gathering bureaucracy dried up its re- 
 sources, destroyed its markets, and 
 withered its population, the approach of 
 sheer ruin shattered the foundation of 
 chattel-slavery on which it rested. And 
 it must be remembered, once for all, that 
 neither prosperity nor adversity, neither 
 good emperors nor bad, neither peace 
 nor war, could release Roman society 
 from this plague of tax-gathering, any 
 more than any increasing sense of the 
 responsibility of the rich for the lives of 
 the poor, or any fresh aspirations to- 
 wards individual righteousness, can free 
 modern society from the thraldom of 
 the hunt for profit. 
 
 The great commercial estates of the 
 Romans, under the name of Latifundia, 
 had absorbed all the agricultural indus- 
 try of the earlier Roman state, which had 
 once been in the hands of the blood rela- 
 tions and household slaves of the pater- 
 familias. But now the profit of working 
 these lands by the instrument of well- 
 organised slavery was vanishing, owing to 
 the break up of the ancient world-market, 
 and the consequently impending ruin. 
 Nothing now remained for the masters 
 
THE TRANSITION PERIOD 51 
 
 of these slaves but to shake off the re- 
 sponsibility for their livelihood, and allow 
 them to cultivate the land in a rough and 
 unorganised way, as partially independent 
 peasants, paying rent in kind and service 
 to the landowners. This seems to have 
 been one of the methods of the merging 
 of the chattel- slave into the mediaeval 
 serf. 
 
 At the same time, not only did this 
 go on very gradually, but domestic 
 slavery and the servile condition of the 
 craftsmen was synchronous with it. 
 
 The other element towards the birth 
 of the feudal system was added by 
 the tribal barbarians who broke in on 
 the last days of the Empire. These 
 bore with them ideas and customs that 
 differed in detail rather than in essence 
 from those of the earlier classical epoch ; 
 and though they no doubt had " thralls," 
 i.e. chattel-slaves, yet those thralls at 
 the worst were in as good a position 
 as the household slaves of the peasant- 
 lords of early Rome, were frequently 
 manumitted, and remained the freedmen 
 of their former masters, still doing service 
 to them. 
 
52 SOCIALISM 
 
 And this idea of service in return for 
 protection, which had been once a Roman 
 idea, was still an essential part of the 
 life of the barbarian tribes, and they 
 imported it into the society that was 
 gradually growing up from the debris 
 of classical society. 
 
 Thus met the two elements necessary 
 for the social life of the new epoch — 
 one the result of the internal decay of the 
 old system ; the other, the growth of the 
 unbroken original barbaric constitution. 
 
 But the ethical and religious condi- 
 tions were also changing, along with the 
 economical : the break - up of the con- 
 stitution of the cities destroyed the social 
 religion of city -worship ; and though 
 some of the forms of the old ancestor- 
 religions and nature-cults of the ancient 
 tribes still survived, the real character- 
 istics of that religion had vanished. 
 
 To fill the void so created in men's 
 minds after the fall of this public faith, 
 there arose another that concentrated 
 the interest on the individual person- 
 ality, now completely dissociated from 
 its old social ties ; concentrated it indeed 
 on this individuality as being something 
 
THE TRANSITION PERIOD 53 
 
 supernatural, and bearing a mysterious 
 relationship with the supreme super- 
 natural power of the universe. Thus it 
 created a religion of the holiness of the 
 soul, as distinct from that righteousness 
 of the material man shown through his 
 actions under a sense of his responsibility 
 to his fellow-men, as embodied in the 
 society of which he was a part. 
 
 This personal religion took the form 
 of Mysteries, some of which were of 
 ancestral or nature-worship origin, but 
 which now received a new application, 
 and symbolised in their ritual spectacles 
 the state of the soul after death, and 
 its ultimate union, when thoroughly 
 purified, with the Supreme Essence or 
 the Divinity of things. In its pagan form 
 as a matter of course it implied a com- 
 plete distinction between the cultivated, 
 who could aspire to an understanding of 
 such high matters, and the unleisured 
 vulgar herd, who saw in the Mysteries 
 mere ceremonies, with an exoteric sig- 
 nificance only. As this new religious 
 spirit developed into Christianity, that 
 exclusiveness proved to be the ruin of 
 its pagan garb since Christianity pro- 
 
54 SOCIALISM 
 
 claimed the accessibility of all men, 
 " learned and lewd," to a full share in 
 all its benefits : though, after all, the 
 exclusiveness soon reasserted itself and 
 created a distinction, not this time 
 between the initiated and the profane, 
 or the philosopher and the common 
 man, but between those devoted to a 
 holy life and those living in the world. 
 
 Christianity was thus enabled to carry 
 through the whole of society a tendency 
 before confined to certain classes of the 
 population alone. Thus the church 
 triumphed, nor was its victory without 
 direct economical causes, for the accumu- 
 lation of wealth in the hands of men 
 whose profession forbade luxury, which 
 wealth was actually largely spent in the 
 maintenance of the poor, had a strong 
 propagandist influence in times which, 
 to judge from the hints left us by 
 history, immediately preceded the official 
 establishment of the Christian religion. 
 
 It is also undoubted that the contests 
 which took place throughout the 4th 
 century, and which were practically 
 ended by the edicts of Theodosius sup- 
 pressing the public exercise of the pagan 
 
THE TRANSITION PERIOD 55 
 
 rites, were mixed with desire on the part 
 of the church to enter into the inherit- 
 ance of the treasures of the various 
 pagan priesthoods. Thus the official 
 religion of Europe was revolutionised 
 without hope of return. 
 
 With the change in economics and 
 religion went also the change in the 
 arts. The Archaic art of the classical 
 nations was expressive, spontaneous, and 
 ornamental ; in the hands of a people so 
 full of talent of all kinds as the Greeks 
 it rapidly developed in skill of execu- 
 tion, until men aspired to perfection 
 in it where perfection was possible ; 
 their strong logical sense perceived the 
 necessary limit herein, and checked all 
 attempts on the outside of that limit ; 
 and as a consequence they attained the 
 desired perfection at the expense on the 
 one hand of the full possibilities of epic 
 expression, and on the other of archi- 
 tectonic ornament. As the public feel- 
 ing — the sense of delight in the service 
 of the city — died out, so what life there 
 was in this perfect but limited art died 
 with it, and at last a caput mortuum of 
 mere plausible academic art was all that 
 
56 SOCIALISM 
 
 was left, which, however, lasted a long 
 time, until, in fact, Classicism had fallen 
 before Christianity. Then after an 
 interregnum of inferiority at once rude 
 and timid, the new art began, influenced 
 doubtless by the communication with the 
 East. Finally, it becomes obvious to us 
 in the buildings raised by Justinian, 
 especially St. Sophia at Constanti- 
 nople, which show a new creation, 
 bearing with it indeed tokens of its 
 birth out of classicism, but yet totally 
 different even as to detail, both in form 
 and spirit. The full weight of the causes 
 which lay behind this transformation 
 will be better appreciated when we come 
 to deal with the art of the fully de- 
 veloped Middle Ages. It is enough 
 here to say that a new style was 
 created, that it only awaited the influ- 
 ence of the barbaric tribes to attain 
 completeness, and that it developed 
 step by step along with the develop- 
 ment of the new society in complete 
 accord with all its necessities and aspira- 
 tions. 
 
 The broken fragments of the Roman 
 Empire amidst all this overturn, had to 
 
THE TRANSITION PERIOD 57 
 
 reckon with that element of the change 
 which was at once most formidable on the 
 surface and most potent for the recon- 
 struction of society, to wit, the incursions 
 of the northern barbarian tribes. 
 
 The political change was brought about 
 in this way : Gaul and Spain, Northern 
 Africa, Roman Germany, Britain, 
 countries all populated by colonists and 
 Romanised natives, and even part of 
 Italy itself, fell under the domination of 
 the Teutonic tribes, and the ancestral 
 tribal leaders became their kings and 
 governors, not seldom under the recog- 
 nised Roman titles of Patrician, Comes, 
 etc. The law of the countries so con- 
 quered was the Roman civil law, with 
 the tribal customs grafted on to it. 
 Whatever oral works of imagination 
 they might have carried with them, 
 their literature soon became that of 
 Rome only ; for the great epical and 
 mythological poems of the race have 
 been kept alive solely by those tribes 
 who never crossed Roman civilisation. 
 
 Their tribal religion soon gave way, 
 nominally at least, to the official religion 
 of the Empire, but nevertheless they 
 
58 SOCIALISM 
 
 impressed some of their customary tra- 
 ditions on the Mediaeval Church of the 
 West, and took away some of its 
 eastern character. Mediaeval Catholi- 
 cism retained in consequence a certain 
 portion of the this-worldliness and the 
 solidarity of barbarian society, and so 
 shows on one side a communistic 
 interest in the corporation, whether 
 church, guild, parish, or even monastery, 
 which is quite alien to the individualistic 
 introspectivism of the Christianity of the 
 decaying Empire ; the latter appears, 
 on the other hand, sporadically, through- 
 out the Middle Ages, in later times 
 gathering volume under the Lollards, 
 and at last culminating in the Protest- 
 antism of the Reformation. 
 
 This interpenetration of progressive 
 barbarism and decaying Roman civilisa- 
 tion, so essential to the life of the new 
 epoch, began with the first invasion of 
 Italy by the Goths (406), and went on 
 through centuries of confused war and 
 struggle, till the process of welding 
 together the varying elements grew 
 complete about the time of Charles the 
 Great, who was crowned at Rome in the 
 
THE TRANSITION PERIOD 59 
 
 year 800. Thus was created the phantom 
 of the Holy Roman, really the German, 
 Empire of the Middle Ages, which con- 
 tinued the legend of Roman domination 
 after the feudal system itself had fallen, 
 while Rome became merely a memory of 
 past history, an ideal for men to look 
 backward to in an age particularly 
 prone to forming such ideals. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 MEDIEVAL SOCIETY— EARLY 
 PERIOD 
 
 \X^E have now to deal with that 
 Mediaeval Society which was 
 based on the fusion of the ideas of tribal 
 communism and Roman individualism 
 and bureaucracy respectively. 
 
 The transition from the Pax Romana, 
 the final establishment of the Roman 
 Empire, the high-water mark of classical 
 civilisation, to the apparent chaos which 
 followed the successful inroads of the 
 barbarian tribes in the 5th century is 
 long and obscure. But the fact before 
 hinted at of the corruption of the 
 Empire into a mere centralised tax- 
 gathering machine is obvious enough to 
 the careful student of history. 
 
MEDIEVAL SOCIETY 61 
 
 The ancient aristocratic families of 
 the provinces were, under the name of 
 the Decuriones, made responsible for the 
 taxes, and had the odium of acting as 
 tax-gatherers, their own estates suffering 
 if they failed to obtain the full amount 
 decreed. As the resources of the 
 Empire began to decline, the central 
 government squeezed so much the 
 harder, and, as before stated, the posi- 
 tion of these Decuriones became in- 
 tolerable, so that they were driven to the 
 wholesale manumission of their slaves. 
 These now became serfs, owing service 
 to their former masters, and being the 
 necessary human live-stock of the great 
 estates once owned by those masters. 
 It seems most probable that these neces- 
 sary circumstances, fused with the system 
 of the Teutonic Mark, gradually pro- 
 duced the Manor, which was the basis of 
 mediaeval economic life. This, of course, 
 only applies to those countries which 
 had been more or less definitely Roman- 
 ised. In other non - Romanised lands 
 the serfs were the descendants of the 
 conquered tribe, while the freemen of 
 the conquering tribe, the " gentle-men," 
 
6z SOCIALISM 
 
 or men of the Gens, were the holders of 
 the land, under some tenure or other. 
 
 The irresistible tendency of the new 
 society, therefore, whatever circumstances 
 it had to deal with, was towards a hier- 
 archical system, under which, while no 
 man was positively owned by another, 
 no man was free of service to another ; 
 even the serfs, the lowest rank, had 
 certain rights, the chief of which was the 
 use of a portion of the Manor ; the 
 right of livelihood, in fact, was not 
 withheld from them, in theory at least. 
 
 The theory of the feudal system is an 
 unbroken chain of service from the serf 
 up to the kaiser, and of protection from 
 the kaiser down to the serf. It recog- 
 nised no absolute ownership of land. 
 God was the owner of the earth, the 
 kaiser and his kings were His vicegerents 
 there, who might devolve their authority 
 to their vassals, and they in turn to 
 theirs, and so on till it reached the serf ; 
 the difference being in the quality of the 
 service, the men of the conquering tribe 
 paying none but military duties of some 
 kind, while the serf paid productive 
 labour. Except the right of livelihood 
 
MEDIEVAL SOCIETY 63 
 
 guaranteed by custom, the latter had in 
 general no rights, but his lord, neverthe- 
 less, was bound to protect him against 
 wrongs from outside. And the theory 
 of the system at least invested the lord 
 with a quasi-religious character. 
 
 The change to this system was much 
 furthered by the domination of the 
 Teutonic races in Italy, France, and 
 Spain, so that the old Roman, or Roman 
 provincial slave-owning noble, was gradu- 
 ally superseded by the barbarian lord of 
 the manor, who naturally carried with 
 him the custom of the tribe, developing 
 little by little into the complete feudal 
 system. This was helped on by the 
 break-up of the world-market of ancient 
 civilisation ; which break-up brought 
 about at last conditions under which the 
 land was the only source of livelihood, 
 and, as we have seen, was cultivated 
 mainly for the behoof of the lords by a 
 population of serfs and of tenants in 
 villenage, — although there were every- 
 where in Teutonic countries remains of 
 the old holding by the freemen of 
 communal lands. 
 
 As already hinted this hierarchical 
 
64 SOCIALISM 
 
 system was mixed up with religious 
 ideas. Accordingly, we find that the 
 Middle Ages had a distinct religion of 
 their own, developed from, but by no 
 means identical with, that early Chris- 
 tianity, which was one of the forces that 
 broke up the Roman Empire. As long 
 as that empire lasted in its integrity 
 Christianity was purely individualistic ; 
 it bade every man do his best for his 
 future in another world, and had no 
 commands to give about the govern- 
 ment of this world, except to obey the 
 " powers that be " in non-religious mat- 
 ters, in order to escape troubles and 
 complications which might distract the 
 attention of the Christian from the king- 
 dom of God. 
 
 But in mediaeval Christianity, although 
 this idea of individual devotion to the 
 perfection of the next world still existed, 
 it was kept in the background, and was 
 almost dormant, except sporadically (as 
 exemplified by St. Thomas a Kempis, 
 St. Francis, St. Bernard, etc.) in the 
 presence of the idea of the Church. 
 The latter was not merely a link between 
 the earthly and the heavenly kingdoms, 
 
MEDIEVAL SOCIETY 65 
 
 but may even be said to have brought 
 the kingdom of heaven to earth by 
 breathing its spirit into the temporal 
 power, which it recognised as another 
 manifestation of its own authority. The 
 struggles between the temporal and the 
 spiritual power, which form so large a 
 part of the history of the Middle Ages, 
 were not the result of any antagonism of 
 ideas between the two, but came of the 
 tendency of one side of the great 
 organisation of society to absorb the 
 other, without rejecting its theory. 
 
 In short, on the one hand, the Church 
 was political and social as much as re- 
 ligious, while, on the other, the State was 
 at least as much religious, as it was 
 political and social. 
 
 For instance, all the great corpora- 
 tions, which were such a prominent 
 feature of the Middle Ages, from the 
 fraternity of knighthood to the guilds 
 of craft, were on the one hand religious 
 institutions, though on the other they 
 were devised for obvious practical pur- 
 poses. Again, in both physicians and 
 lawyers a certain religious character 
 was formally recognised, of which some 
 
 F 
 
66 SOCIALISM 
 
 shadow of a memory still exists in their 
 official garments and formulae. 
 
 As an example of the closeness with 
 which this idea of the gradation of ranks 
 for service-protection clung to the re- 
 ligious, as well as to the secular, polity 
 of the Middle Ages, we may cite the 
 Mystery Plays, in which not only 
 heaven and earth are furnished each 
 with its due hierarchy, but hell also 
 has a like constitution. The simple 
 mediaeval man conceived of the uni- 
 verse, it must be remembered, as 
 divided into three parts, heaven above, 
 earth in the midst, and hell below, 
 though this was modified with the more 
 learned by a curious mixture of quasi- 
 Ptolemaic lore. 
 
 But the relations between the feudal 
 lords, their vassals and their serfs, as 
 such, only show us one side of the 
 society of the Middle Ages. The 
 tendency to association within that 
 society is one of its most marked 
 features. In fact, nothing could be 
 done in those days without such associa- 
 tion. Life seemed impossible to the 
 mediaeval mind without common action. 
 
MEDIAEVAL SOCIETY 67 
 
 All men, as we have seen, both great 
 and small, belonged to the great corpor- 
 ation of the Church ; damnation in this 
 world and the next was the only alter- 
 native. The ecclesiastics proper, and 
 those specially devoted to the religious 
 life, including those whose business was 
 fighting for the Church, formed them- 
 selves into strictly regulated orders. 
 The nobles were bound by the ties of 
 the fraternity of knighthood in one or 
 other of its forms. 
 
 Production and Exchange were in the 
 hands of great associations formed by 
 traders and craftsmen for protection of 
 commerce and organisation of industry. 
 
 The mediaeval towns had two origins : 
 first, there was the town, which was 
 a survival of the city of Roman times, 
 and is mostly found in the south 
 of Europe, Italy, Spain, France, etc., 
 although there are examples in Britain 
 and Western Germany. And next there 
 were the new towns which grew up for 
 reasons of convenience out of the " Mark," 
 and for the most part became incorpor- 
 ated into the feudal manorial system. 
 The freemen — that is, the landholders of 
 
68 SOCIALISM 
 
 the mark, formed a municipal aristocracy 
 in these inchoate towns, and from them 
 the governing body was chosen. When 
 the towns began to be incorporated 
 through privileges granted to them by 
 their feudal overlord, the old semi-in- 
 dependent inhabitants, who were prob- 
 ably the survival of the conquered tribe, 
 joined to those who had flowed into the 
 town for protection and convenience, 
 formed a population of craftsmen and 
 traders. Of these, the traders, who 
 fetched and carried wares from the east 
 of Europe, mainly Byzantium, still the 
 centre of organised commerce as in 
 the later Empire, were the most im- 
 portant as to position, although very 
 few in numbers. They were the first 
 founders of the Merchant Guild, which, 
 as its name imports, was purely commer- 
 cial in tendency, although organised like 
 all associations of the Middle Ages on 
 quasi-religious grounds, and including 
 some survivals of the fellowship of the 
 freemen. A recent work on the Merchant 
 Guild by Mr. Grosse shows conclusively 
 that it was not deduced from the old 
 Frith-gild; neither, on the other hand, 
 
MEDIAEVAL SOCIETY 69 
 
 was it identical with the corporation of 
 the towns, since non-residents could be 
 members of it, whereas the members of 
 the corporation (Les Lineages, Geschlechte, 
 Porterey, Ehrbarkeit, Patricians, etc.) 
 were bound to be holders of the lands 
 which were once tribal. 
 
 But the principle of association was 
 sure to have further development amongst 
 the useful classes of the time ; as handi- 
 craft began to grow in its capacity for 
 production, guilds for the special crafts 
 were founded all over Europe, till they 
 embraced every department of crafts- 
 manship in the widest sense of the word ; 
 thus the ploughman's guild was the 
 most important one in the villages and 
 small towns of England. The consti- 
 tution of these guilds was strictly on the 
 received model of mediaeval associations, 
 but concerned itself also with the min- 
 utest details of the craft. They were 
 thoroughly recognised legal bodies, hav- 
 ing the power of enforcing penalties 
 for the breaking of their special rules ; 
 and before long they became partakers 
 in the supreme government of the 
 towns, being commonly represented on 
 
70 SOCIALISM 
 
 the corporation by members of their 
 own body. In the later period of 
 the Middle Ages they even went 
 beyond this, and in not a few cases 
 the representatives of the craft -guilds 
 pushed out the original aristocracy, the 
 men of the Lineages, Geschlechte, or 
 Patricians. For example, towards the 
 close of the 15th century, in Zurich, 
 Hans Waldmann, the famous Burger- 
 master of that town, who had originally 
 been a member of the tanner's guild, on 
 attaining to power, altered the constitu- 
 tion of the executive, which had at first 
 been composed, half of the municipal 
 aristocracy, and half of the guildsmen, 
 and gained a definite perpetual majority 
 for the latter by increasing the propor- 
 tion of their representatives to two-thirds. 
 Even earlier than this, in the latter half 
 of the 14th century, the account given 
 us by Froissart of the famous war of 
 Ghent and its allies against their feudal 
 lord, the Earl of Flanders, shows us 
 that the municipal aristocracy had little 
 power unless backed by the craft-guilds. 
 Wherever in Flanders "the lesser crafts" 
 (i.e. mainly the handicrafts) were 
 
MEDIEVAL SOCIETY 71 
 
 powerful, the corporation had to give 
 way, and take up the war against the 
 Earl ; where the " greater crafts " (such 
 as the mariners) had sway, the corpora- 
 tion was able to hold the town for 
 him. 
 
 To sum up, the corporation was the 
 direct descendant of the mark, i.e. 
 the tribal land-holding body, and the 
 common tendency was for the craft-guilds 
 to supplant this aristocracy after the 
 Merchant Guilds had been overshadowed 
 by their growing power. We may again 
 mention that these corporations and 
 guilds, the industrial associations in short, 
 were accepted as due and legal members 
 of the feudal hierarchy. It is necessary 
 now to take note of the relations between 
 them and the kings and their nobles. 
 
 As soon as feudalism became para- 
 mount in Europe, the tribal mark lost its 
 independence, and came under the domin- 
 ation of the baron or lord of the manor, 
 although much of its constitution and 
 most of its customs remained intact 
 under the feudal lordship, 1 as they had 
 done under Roman bureaucracy. As the 
 
 1 Cf. Gomme's Village Communities. 
 
72 SOCIALISM 
 
 mark became consolidated into the 
 town, with the land attached thereto, it 
 began to acquire fresh privileges from 
 its new lords, lay and ecclesiastic. These 
 privileges were for the most part bought 
 from the overlords under the compulsion 
 of the need of money, bred by the wars 
 they were engaged in, or, in the church 
 territories, by the overweening love 
 of splendid building, and the intrigues 
 with Rome and foreign courts in which 
 they were involved. These privileges 
 consisted mainly of independent juris- 
 diction, rights of market and tolls, 
 freedom from military service, etc., etc. 
 It was the interest of the towns to 
 favour the growth of power in the king 
 or monarch, since he was far off, and his 
 domination was much less real and much 
 less vexatious than that of the feudal 
 neighbour, their immediate lord. The 
 king, on his side, always engaged in 
 disputes with his baronage, found his 
 interest in creating and supporting free 
 corporations in the towns, and thereby 
 curbing the overweening power of his 
 vassals ; while at the same time the 
 growing production of the towns added 
 
MEDIEVAL SOCIETY 73 
 
 to his exchequer, by creating a fresh 
 source of supply, easier to exploit than 
 that which the military nobles yielded. 
 
 This process of the gaining of inde- 
 pendence of the growing mediaeval towns 
 began as early as the 11th century, and 
 culminated in the 14th. The first 
 English charter was granted by Edward 
 the Confessor. In France the first charter 
 was granted to Le Mans in 1072, to 
 Cambrai 1076 ; Laon, Beauvais, Amiens, 
 and other towns followed. In later 
 times the kings themselves founded free 
 towns, as notably Edward I., both in 
 Guienne and England ; Kingston upon 
 Hull {Jiodie Hull) and Winchelsea are 
 examples of such places still remaining, 
 though fortune has dealt with these two 
 in such a widely different way. 
 
 In Spain, in quite early days the 
 Visigothic code, a blending of Roman 
 law and Teutonic custom, recognised the 
 corporations definitely : the first charter 
 was granted to Leon in 1020. 
 
 In Germany the towns were in the 
 early Middle Ages appanages of the 
 vassals of the Empire, and were governed 
 by the bishops as their vicars: the 
 
74 SOCIALISM 
 
 process of emancipation here was that 
 at first, in the 12th century, the towns- 
 men carried on a government side by 
 side with the bishop, and in the 13th 
 century got rid of him either by pur- 
 chase or main force, and so at last 
 reached the goal of holding directly of 
 the Empire. When this was accom- 
 plished, they were more completely freed 
 than elsewhere in Europe, and ensured 
 their independence by the formation 
 of confederacies of cities, of which the 
 Hanseatic League was the most famous. 
 In Flanders, owing to the great de- 
 velopment of production by handicraft, 
 the cities, though not theoretically so 
 free, were powerful enough to carry on 
 a struggle with their feudal lord through 
 almost the whole of the 14th century, 
 and were not altogether crushed, even 
 when the battle of Rosebeque and the 
 death of Philip van Artavelde closed the 
 more dramatic phase of that struggle. 
 As an example of the completeness of 
 the legal recognition of the status of 
 these cities, it may be mentioned that, 
 in the second act of the war with the 
 Earl of Flanders, when the younger 
 
MEDIEVAL SOCIETY 75 
 
 Artavelde was entering on the scene, the 
 city of Ghent summoned to its banner 
 certain knights and lords to do it due 
 military feudal service, while these very 
 lords were in the Earl's camp preparing 
 to do battle against Ghent : but it is 
 clear that the historian recognises to the 
 full the right of the city in the matter, 
 though he applauds the refusal of the 
 vassals on " gentlemanly " grounds. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE ROUGH SIDE OF THE 
 MIDDLE AGES 
 
 HpHE sketch just concluded of the 
 composition of society during the 
 Middle Ages by no means accords with 
 the idea of that epoch which still holds 
 its place in the mind of the general 
 public. In spite of the researches and 
 labours of enlightened historians in recent 
 times, such as Hallam in the early part 
 of the century, and, of late years, of men 
 like Green, Freeman, and Stubbs, the re- 
 presentation of the Middle Ages put 
 forward by bourgeois historians, whose 
 aim was the praising of the escape or 
 modern society from a period of mere 
 rapine and confusion, into peace, order, 
 and prosperity, is generally accepted. 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 77 
 
 Doubtless there was a rough side to 
 the Middle Ages as to every other epoch, 
 but there was also genuine life and pro- 
 gress in them. This, as we have seen, 
 expressed itself on one side in the hier- 
 archical order of feudal society, which 
 was so far from being lawless that, on the 
 contrary, law received somewhat undue 
 observance therein. And on the other 
 side that there were certain compensations 
 to the shortcomings of the epoch, which 
 we shall have to consider before long. 
 
 At present, however, let us look at 
 the rough side of the mediaeval cloth, 
 with the preliminary remark, that those 
 who have drawn so violent a contrast 
 between mediaeval disadvantages and the 
 gains of modern life, have been by 
 nature and circumstances incapable of 
 seeing the compensations above-said. 
 
 The shortcomings of the life of the 
 Middle Ages resolve themselves in the 
 main, firstly, to the rudeness of life and 
 absence of material comforts : secondly, 
 to the element of oppression and violence 
 in which men lived ; and thirdly, to the 
 ignorance and superstition which veiled 
 so much of our truth from their minds. 
 
78 SOCIALISM 
 
 As to the rudeness of life it must be 
 remembered that men do not suffer from 
 the lack of comforts which they have 
 never had before their eyes, and of which 
 they cannot even conceive. Indeed, 
 in our own day, though we can con- 
 ceive that flying would be a pleasanter 
 method of progression than an express 
 train, nevertheless we are not made 
 unhappy by the fact of our not being 
 able to fly. The sensitiveness of men 
 adapts itself easily to their surround- 
 ing conditions, and such inconveni- 
 ences as may exist in these are not felt 
 by those who consider them unavoid- 
 able. It is true that this argument can 
 only be put forward when the short- 
 comings are not of a nature to degrade 
 those who have to bear them ; but it 
 must be admitted that there is no degrada- 
 tion in mere external roughness of life. 
 For the rest, though it would be a shock 
 for the modern man to be transplanted, 
 without preparation, into mediaeval con- 
 ditions, the mediaeval man in his turn 
 would probably be as ill at ease amid 
 the " comforts " of modern London. 
 
 Another consideration is far more 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 79 
 
 serious than this, and far more calculated 
 to shake our complacency in modern civil- 
 isation, to wit that whatever advantages 
 we have gained over the Middle Ages 
 are not shared by the greater part of our 
 population. The whole of our unskilled 
 labouring classes are in a far worse 
 position as to food, housing, and clothing 
 than any but the extreme fringe of the 
 corresponding class in the Middle Ages. 
 Let us look next at the ignorance and 
 superstition of the Middle Ages. In the 
 main this ignorance meant a naivete in 
 their conceptions of the universe, which 
 was partly a survival of the animism of 
 the earlier world. The ignorance was 
 not a matter of brutal choice ; on the 
 contrary, there was a keen and disin- 
 terested search after truth and know- 
 ledge : and the very fact of the region 
 of discovery being so unknown added 
 the charm of wonder and scientific 
 imagination to the research. Nor 
 should it be forgotten that what to us 
 has become superstition was to them 
 science, and that in all probability 
 our science will be the superstition 
 of future times. It is being acknow- 
 
8o SOCIALISM 
 
 ledged every day that modern accepted 
 scientific explanations of the " nature 
 of things" are becoming more and 
 more inadequate to the satisfaction of 
 true knowledge. The Ptolemaic theory 
 of astronomy was good enough for the 
 data of its day ; and though it has been 
 superseded by the Copernican system, that 
 in its turn is limited as an explanation by 
 the present condition of our knowledge 
 of the universe. Though the world will 
 never go back to Ptolemy's explanation, 
 it will go forward to something more 
 complete than any yet put forth. 
 
 There remains the charge of violence 
 and misery to be dealt with. As to the 
 misery, the result partly of that violence 
 and partly of the deficient grasp of the 
 resources of nature, its manifestations 
 were so much more dramatic than the 
 misery of our time produces, that at this 
 distance they have the effect of over- 
 shadowing the everyday life of the 
 period, which in fact was not constantly 
 burdened by them. What misery exists 
 in our own days is not spasmodic and 
 accidental, but chronic and essential to 
 the system under which we live. The 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 81 
 
 well-to-do bourgeois of the nineteenth 
 century may indeed make light of this 
 misery, while he shudders at the horrors 
 of torture, and sack, and massacre of the 
 Middle Ages, because he does not feel 
 the modern misery in his own person : 
 but the proletarian of our commercial age, 
 though he be hardened to bear his lot, 
 is not only degraded by the constant 
 pressure of sordid troubles, but cannot 
 fail to note the contrast which every 
 hour thrusts before his eyes between that 
 lot and the easy life of his masters — the 
 possessing classes. In mediaeval times the 
 violence and suffering did not spare one 
 class and fall wholly upon another, the 
 most numerous in the community. Even 
 the king's person was found by many 
 examples to be by no means sacred : 
 " Strike the lords and spare the com- 
 mons " was the cry that went up in 
 the chase of the bloody battles of the 
 Roses. The unsuccessful politician did 
 not retire to the ease and pleasure 
 of a country house, flavoured with a 
 little literary labour and apologetics 
 for his past mistakes, but paid with 
 his head, or the torment of his body, 
 
 G 
 
82 SOCIALISM 
 
 for his miscalculations as to possible 
 majorities. 
 
 Furthermore, the very roughness and 
 adventure of life of those days made 
 people less sensitive to bodily pain than 
 they are now. Their nerves were not 
 so high-strung as ours are, so that 
 the apprehension of torture or death did 
 not weigh heavily upon them. Of this 
 history affords abundant evidence. 
 
 Death, moreover, to them seemed but 
 a temporary interruption of the course 
 of their life. Men in those days really 
 conceived of the continuity of life as a 
 simple and absolute fact. The belief in 
 a future state had not as yet become a 
 mere vague and metaphorical expression, 
 as it is to-day, when no one attempts 
 even in thought to realise it for himself; 
 it was as real to them as palpable every- 
 day matters. In this it will be evident 
 that it was different from the spiritualised 
 belief in a union with God or Christ 
 which seems to have animated the early 
 Christian, and which survived in some of 
 the mediasval saints and mystics, such as 
 St. Francis and St. Catherine of Siena. 
 
 In short it is clear that such misery as 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 83 
 
 existed in the Middle Ages, was different 
 in essence from that of our times ; one 
 piece of evidence alone forces this con- 
 clusion upon us : the Middle Ages 
 were essentially the epoch of Popular 
 Art, the art of the people ; whatever were 
 the conditions of the life of the time, 
 they produced an enormous volume of 
 visible and tangible beauty, even taken 
 per se, and still more extraordinary 
 when considered beside the sparse popu- 
 lation of those ages. The " misery " from 
 amidst of which this came, whatever it 
 was, must have been something totally 
 unlike, and surely far less degrading than 
 the misery of modern Whitechapel, from 
 which not even the faintest scintilla of 
 art can be struck, in spite of the idealising 
 of slum life by the modern philanthropic 
 sentimentalist and his allies, the im- 
 pressionist novelist and painter. 
 
 We have thought it necessary to meet 
 objections as to over-valuing the import- 
 ance of the Middle Ages, but it must 
 be understood that we do not stand 
 forward as apologists for them except in 
 relation to modern times. The part 
 which they played in the course of history 
 
84 SOCIALISM 
 
 was not only necessary to the develop- 
 ment of the life of the world, but 
 was so special and characteristic that it 
 will leave its mark on future ages in 
 spite of the ignorant contemplation of 
 them from which we are slowly emerging. 
 They had their own faults and miseries, 
 their own uses and advantages, and they 
 left behind them works to show that at 
 least happiness and cheerful intelligence 
 were possible sometimes and somewhere 
 in them, even amongst that working 
 class, which now has to bear the whole 
 burden of our follies and mistakes. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE END OF THE MIDDLE 
 AGES 
 
 DY about the year 1350 the craft-guilds 
 received all the development pos- 
 sible to them as societies of freemen and 
 equals ; and that date may conveniently 
 be accepted as the end of the first part of 
 the Middle Ages. 
 
 By this time serfdom generally was 
 beginning to yield to the change intro- 
 duced by the guilds and free towns : the 
 field serfs partly drifted into the cities 
 and became affiliated to the guilds, and 
 partly became free men, though living on 
 lands whose tenure was unfree. This 
 movement towards the break-up of serf- 
 dom is marked by the Peasants' War in 
 England, led by Wat Tyler and John 
 
86 SOCIALISM 
 
 Ball in Kent, and by John Lister (dyer) 
 in East Anglia, which was the answer 
 of the combined yeomen, emancipated 
 and unemancipated serfs, to the attempt 
 of the nobles to check the movement. 
 
 But the development of the craft- 
 guilds and the flocking of the freed serfs 
 into the towns laid the foundations for 
 another change in industrialism : with 
 the second part of the mediaeval period 
 appears the journeyman, or so-called 
 free labourer. Besides the craftsmaster 
 and his apprentices, the workshop now 
 has these " free labourers " in it — un- 
 privileged workmen, that is, who are 
 nevertheless under the domination of the 
 guild, and compelled to affiliation with 
 it. But so completely was the idea of 
 association innate in mediaeval life that 
 even this first step towards disruption 
 came for a time under the guild-influence : 
 in Germany especially, the guilds of 
 journeymen were so important as to form 
 a complete network through all central 
 Europe. The j ourneyman if he presented 
 himself before the guild in any town was 
 taken charge of, and livelihood and 
 employment found for him. In England 
 
END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 87 
 
 the attempt at founding journeymen- 
 guilds had little success, probably because 
 it came too late. 
 
 After this the guildsmen began to 
 be privileged workmen ; and with them 
 began the foundation of the present 
 middle-class, whose development from 
 this source went on to meet its other 
 development on the side of trade which 
 was now becoming noticeable. In 1453 
 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, 
 and as a consequence Greek manuscripts 
 were being discovered and read ; a thirst 
 for new or revived learning outside the 
 superstitions of the mediaeval church, and 
 the quaint, curiously perverted, and half- 
 understood remains of popular traditions, 
 was arising. The new art of printing 
 began to spread with marvellous rapidity 
 from about the year 1470 ; and all was 
 getting ready for the transformation of 
 mediaeval into modern or commercial 
 society. 
 
 Before the beginning of the sixteenth 
 century the craft-guilds had gradually 
 reduced the others to insignificance, but 
 the spirit in which they were founded 
 was dying out in the meantime. They 
 
88 SOCIALISM 
 
 were originally societies of equal crafts- 
 men governed by officers of their own 
 choice, and their rules were obviously 
 directed against the growth of capitalism, 
 as e.g. those of the clothiers of Flanders, 
 which limited the number of looms in 
 any master's shop to four. Inferiority 
 in the guild was only temporary ; every 
 apprentice, or bachelor, was bound to 
 become a master in time. But now 
 this had been changing for some while, 
 and the journeyman made his appearance 
 in the workshops under the name of 
 servant. The entrance-fee increased so 
 much that it is clear that it denotes more 
 than the mere fall in the value of gold, 
 and meant the buying of a share in a 
 monopolist company rather than the 
 necessary contribution to a craftsman's 
 society. In short, by the middle of the 
 sixteenth century the guilds were organis- 
 ations including somewhat more than 
 the germs of capital served by labour ; 
 nothing more was needed than external 
 circumstances for the development from 
 this of complete capitalistic privilege. 
 
 Apart from the guilds, the two classes 
 of capitalists and free workmen were 
 
END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 89 
 
 being created by the development of 
 commerce, which needed them both as 
 instruments for her progress. Mediaeval 
 commerce knew nothing of capitalistic 
 exchange ; the demands of local markets 
 were supplied by the direct barter or sale 
 of the superfluity of the produce of the 
 various districts and countries. All this 
 was now being changed, and a world- 
 market was being formed, into which all 
 commodities had to pass ; and a mercan- 
 tile class grew up for the carrying 
 on of this new commerce, and soon 
 attained to power, amidst the rapid 
 break-up of the old hierarchical society 
 with its duly ordered grades. 
 
 The fall of Constantinople was followed 
 in thirty years by the discovery of 
 America, and about the same time of 
 the Cape passage, which ultimately super- 
 seded the old trade route overland by 
 the Levant and the Bavarian cities. And 
 now the Mediterranean was no longer the 
 great commercial sea, with nothing beyond 
 it but a few outlying stations. The 
 cities of Central Europe — e.g. Augsburg, 
 Nuremberg, Munich, and the Hanse 
 towns — were now sharing the market 
 
9 o SOCIALISM 
 
 with Venice and Genoa, the children of 
 Constantinople : there was no longer one 
 great commanding city in Europe. But 
 it was not only the rise in the commercial 
 towns that was overturning feudal society. 
 As they conquered their enemy, the 
 feudal nobles, they fell into the clutches 
 of bureaucratic monarchs, who either 
 seized on them for their own possessions, 
 or used them as tools for their projects of 
 conquest and centralisation. Charles V., 
 e.g., played this game through South 
 Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, 
 and with Venice, under cover of the so- 
 called " Holy Roman Empire," while at 
 the same time he had fallen into pos- 
 session of Spain by marriage ; and dis- 
 regarding his sham feudal empire, he 
 bent all his efforts into turning these 
 countries into real bureaucratic states. 
 In France the liberties of the towns 
 were crushed out by Louis XI. and his 
 successors. In England the plunder of 
 the religious houses enabled Henry VIII. 
 to found a new nobility, subservient to 
 his own absolutism, in place of the 
 ancient feudal nobility destroyed by 
 their late civil war. 
 
END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 91 
 
 Everywhere the modern centralised 
 bureaucratic nation was being developed. 
 In France the long and fierce wars of 
 the Burgundian and Armagnac factions 
 gave opportunity for the consolidation of 
 the monarchy, at last effected, as above 
 said by Louis XL, the forerunner of the 
 most successful king of France and the 
 last successful one — Louis XIV. In 
 England the Wars of the Roses were 
 not so bitter as the French wars, and the 
 people took small part in them, except as 
 vassals or retainers of the households of 
 the contending nobles ; but they never- 
 theless played their part in the disruption 
 of feudality, not only by the thinning- 
 out of the nobles slain in battle or on 
 the scaffold, but also by helping directly 
 to draw England into the world-market. 
 
 Under the mediaeval system the work- 
 men, oppressed and protected by the 
 lords of the manor and the guilds, were 
 not available for the needs of commerce. 
 The serfs ate up the part of the produce 
 spared them by their lords ; the guild 
 craftsmen sold the produce of their own 
 hands to their neighbours without the 
 help of a middleman. In neither case 
 
92 SOCIALISM 
 
 was there anything left over for the 
 supply of a great market. 
 
 But England, one of the best pasture 
 countries of the world, had in her even 
 then capacities for profit-grinding, if the 
 tillage system of the manor and the 
 yeoman's holdings could be got rid of. 
 The landowners, ruined by their long 
 war, saw the demand for English wool, 
 and set themselves to the task of helping 
 evolution with much of the vigour and 
 unscrupulous pettifogging which has 
 since won for their race the temporary 
 command of the world-market. The 
 tenants were rack-rented, the yeomen 
 were expropriated, the hinds were driven 
 off" the land into the towns, there to work 
 as " free " labourers. England thus con- 
 tributed her share to commerce, paying 
 for it with nothing more important than 
 the loss of the rough joviality, plenty, 
 and independence of spirit, which once 
 attracted the admiration of foreigners 
 more crushed by the feudal system and 
 by its abuses than were the English. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE AND THE 
 REFORMATION 
 
 'HUS all over Europe commercialism 
 was rising. New needs were being 
 discovered by men who were gaining 
 fresh mastery over nature, and were set 
 free from old restraints to struggle for 
 individual pre-eminence. A fresh intelli- 
 gence and mental energy was shedding 
 its light over the more sordid side of 
 the period of change. The study of the 
 Greek literature at first hand was aiding 
 this new intelligence among cultivated 
 men, and also, since they did but half 
 understand its spirit, was warping their 
 minds into fresh error. For the science 
 of history and the critical observation 
 of events had not yet been born ; and to 
 
94 SOCIALISM 
 
 the ardent spirits of the Renaissance, 
 there had never been but two peoples 
 worth notice — to wit, the Greeks and 
 Romans, whom their new disciples strove 
 to imitate in every thing which was 
 deemed of importance at the time. 
 
 Now also, as at all periods of intel- 
 lectual ferment, Occultism, that is the 
 magical conception of nature, obtained a 
 numerous following. This, of course, 
 was partly the result of the study of the 
 recently-discovered writings of the last 
 period of transition, — that of the early 
 Christian centuries, — the Neo- Platonic 
 and other Hermetic literature, joined to 
 the fact that science, in the modern 
 acceptation of the word, was in its first 
 dawning. The science of the Renais- 
 sance is mainly a systematisation of 
 mediaeval traditional science, with an 
 admixture of the later classical and 
 oriental theories, to which no doubt is 
 added a certain amount of the results of 
 genuine observation. It is represented 
 by such men as Paracelsus, Nostradamus, 
 and Cornelius Agrippa, and, we may 
 add, by the mythical Dr. Faustus. 
 
 Amidst all this it is clear that the old 
 
RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 95 
 
 religion would no longer serve the new 
 spirit of the times. The mediaeval 
 church, the kingdom of heaven on earth, 
 in full sympathy with the temporal 
 hierarchy, in which also every one had 
 his divinely appointed place, and which 
 restricted commerce and forbade usury, 
 such was no religion for the new com- 
 mercialism ; the latter's creed must have 
 nothing to do with the business of 
 this world ; so the individualist ethics of 
 early Christianity, which had been kept in 
 the background during the period of the 
 mediaeval church, were once more brought 
 to the front, and took the place of the 
 corporate ethics of that church, of which 
 each one of the " faithful " was but a part. 
 
 A new form of Christianity, therefore, 
 had to be found to suit the needs of the 
 new Europe which was being born : but 
 this adaptation of Christianity took two 
 shapes, so widely different from each other 
 that they have usually been opposed as con- 
 trasting religions, which is an inaccurate 
 view to take of the matter, since they 
 are but two sides of the same shield. 
 
 These two forms were Protestantism, 
 and modern or Jesuitised Catholicism ; 
 
96 SOCIALISM 
 
 the protagonists of either side being 
 nameable as Martin Luther and Ignatius 
 Loyala. Almost the whole Teutonic 
 race adopted Protestantism in one or 
 other of its forms, and the leading men 
 among them accepted its teachings with 
 depth and sincerity : amongst the Latin- 
 ised nations it made no real progress, 
 and wherever it gained many adherents, 
 as in the case of the French Huguenots, 
 it was little more than a political badge. 
 It is worthy of remark, too, that, at the 
 present day, in Geneva, the city of 
 Calvin, which is really a French city, 
 the Catholics considerably outnumber 
 the Protestants. It may be noted, as 
 showing the real strength of the Pro- 
 testant feeling in the north of Europe, 
 that in those countries where the religious 
 struggle was most severe — as in Scotland, 
 England, Holland, and Switzerland — the 
 quality that finally predominated made 
 the form of religion the furthest removed 
 from mediaeval Catholicism : while in 
 places where the Reformation made itself, 
 so to say, as in Scandinavia and the 
 north of Germany, the outward change 
 was comparatively slight. 
 
RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 97 
 
 The Protestant Puritanism which is 
 even yet so strong in these islands, has no 
 analogue in the Protestantism of the rest 
 of Europe, but is a strange isolated fact, 
 the result probably of some qualities in- 
 herent in the population, and developed 
 by circumstances : indeed there are traces 
 of it discoverable in mediaeval England, 
 and that not amongst the Lollards only ; 
 and it must be confessed that the origin 
 of this spirit is as obscure as the fact 
 of its existence is baneful. Its long- 
 enduring and deep-seated strength may 
 be gauged by the success that always 
 attends appeals made to it in the present 
 day by time-serving politicians and 
 popularity-hunting journalists. 1 
 
 Modern Catholicism, as above said, is 
 personally represented bylgnatiusLoyala, 
 whose order of Jesus practically changed 
 the whole face of the religion. Medieval 
 Catholicism was the natural growth of 
 that simple and naive conception of the 
 universe which we have commented on 
 before, and a member of the church of 
 the Middle Ages was always surrounded 
 
 1 Cf. the case of the late Mr. Parnell, overthrown by it in 
 the very hour of his triumph. 
 
 H 
 
98 SOCIALISM 
 
 by the sense of his membership, and 
 could not step out of it in the perform- 
 ance of the ordinary acts of his life. 
 Protestantism was a recrudescence of 
 the individualist religion of early Chris- 
 tianity. Jesuitical Catholicism, while re- 
 taining all the old mediaeval forms, was 
 really more akin to the Protestantism of 
 the times which had created both. It 
 was no growth of the ages, but a product 
 of the necessities of the ecclesiasticism of 
 the Renaissance. The humanist learn- 
 ing of the period, which at first dis- 
 regarded Christianity altogether, passed 
 in the end into this Jesuitised, casuistical 
 form of Christianity ; and it must be 
 noted here that the education of Catholic 
 countries in the centuries that followed 
 the Reformation fell almost entirely into 
 the hands of the Jesuits. It is true 
 that the missions carried on amongst 
 barbarous peoples by the Order, so 
 famous for their complete organisation, 
 and the unshrinking devotion of the 
 brethren, were also distinguished by the 
 humanity of their treatment of these 
 peoples, and offer a strong contrast to 
 the brutality of the commercial bureau- 
 
RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 99 
 
 cracies and their buccaneering fringes. 
 Yet though they showed the good side 
 of the change from mediaeval to modern 
 life, the end of their powerful organisa- 
 tion was the establishment of that spirit 
 of commercial society to which both this 
 modified Catholicism and the so-called 
 Reformed religions were but adjuncts. 
 It is significant that they carefully 
 abstained from following the example of 
 the mediaeval church in condemning the 
 grosser forms of commerce such as usury; 
 and, in short, their religion, like that of 
 the Protestants, was not of this world. 
 Hence they were essentially allies of 
 the rising bureaucratic system in equal 
 measure with their opponents. 
 
 As regards politics, Charles V. is 
 the personality representing the great 
 change on that side of things. The 
 welding of Spain into a nation, begun 
 under Ferdinand and Isabella, the con- 
 querors of Granada, was accomplished 
 by him. Under the pressure of his 
 attempts to unify Germany in the same 
 manner, the rulers of the great terri- 
 tories, the princes of the Empire, con- 
 solidated their lands, and turned them 
 
ioo SOCIALISM 
 
 from feudal domains into political 
 nations, as Prussia, Brunswick, Saxony, 
 Bavaria, Brandenburg, Hesse Cassel, 
 Wurtemberg, and others of less im- 
 portance. 
 
 Charles V.'s rival, Francis I., continued 
 the consolidation of the French king- 
 dom, begun with such vigour, astuteness, 
 and consequent success, by Louis XI. 
 In England the Tudor monarchy put 
 the last touch to the creation of a 
 political nation, under the cover of the 
 strange phantasm of the divine right of 
 kings, — so contrary to the mediaeval 
 idea of the responsibility of the king to 
 the feudal hierarchy in general, — which 
 seems to have been partly the outcome 
 of the Puritan worship of the Old 
 Testament with its despotic oriental 
 principles. 
 
 All this meant the crushing out of 
 the old feudal vassals, the creation of a 
 fresh nobility wholly dependent on the 
 king, mere courtiers waiting on his 
 person, or functionaries appointed to 
 manage his estate ; for the new political 
 nation was regarded as the property of 
 the king, who no longer owned any 
 
RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 101 
 
 responsibility to any one, as a king, 
 not even to his God. 
 
 All this change, ecclesiastical and 
 civil, was not accomplished without 
 a certain amount of protest in the form 
 of direct revolt, the most noteworthy 
 event of which was the Peasant War in 
 Germany (152 5- 1526). At this time, 
 throughout Europe, the increase in 
 luxury drove the lords of the land to 
 harsher exactions than ever for the pro- 
 curing of money for dealing with the 
 merchants, and the usurer grew in im- 
 portance at the same time. Against 
 this oppression there rose, and spread 
 with extraordinary rapidity (at the 
 above-mentioned date), an insurrec- 
 tion more widespread than any pre- 
 vious revolts of the Middle Ages, one 
 of the leading figures in which was 
 Thomas Miinzer. He put forward 
 a sort of mystical commission, which 
 proclaimed the brotherhood of Chris- 
 tians, and the economical and social 
 equality of all men. His doctrines 
 were widely accepted, but he was, after 
 some weeks of power, defeated, and 
 executed near Mulhausen (in Turingia) 
 
loz SOCIALISM 
 
 in 1525. It must be said, however, 
 that there was more than one strain 
 in the Peasant War. The great princes 
 of the Empire, under cover of suppres- 
 sion of the rebels, sought to consolidate 
 their power, and to complete the subjuga- 
 tion of the smaller feudal nobility, " the 
 knighthood." These had had their last 
 champion in the celebrated Ulric von 
 Hutten, who, amidst a life of romantic 
 adventure and studious occupation, at- 
 tacked the higher nobles with the full 
 power of his literary genius, and worked 
 hard on the side of the knights under 
 the leadership of Franz von Sick- 
 ingen in 1 522-1 523. The princes tri- 
 umphed, and therewith the political side 
 of mediaeval Germany came to an end. 
 As for Miinzer, he may be considered 
 as the precursor of the later Anabaptist 
 revolt ; for the movement in which he 
 worked, after this collapse, sprang up 
 again, and, continuing in an underground 
 manner, culminated at last in the Ana- 
 baptist rising under John of Leyden, 
 the last act of which was the siege 
 and capture of Minister, and the mas- 
 sacre of the rebels in that city. 
 
RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 103 
 
 The religious wars of France, and 
 the revolt of the Huguenots against 
 the reigning monarchs, can hardly be 
 brought within the category of these 
 popular movements ; but were rather 
 contests between factions, neither of 
 whom had really any special principles 
 to maintain. 
 
 In England a series of revolts took 
 place during the reigns of the last two 
 Henries, and into the reign of Elizabeth, 
 which were mostly directed against 
 fiscal oppression, the necessary result of 
 the new bureaucratic rule. The most 
 important of these was that led by Kett 
 in Norfolk. They were one and all put 
 down with various degrees of wholesale 
 massacre and cruelty. 
 
 The middle of the sixteenth century, 
 therefore, brings us to this, that the 
 animating spirit of feudal society is 
 dead, though its forms still exist, and 
 are used for its own purposes by the 
 bureaucratic system, which has now 
 supplanted feudalism throughout the 
 length and breadth of Europe. This 
 must be considered as the beginning of 
 the first period of modern History. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 MODERN SOCIETY : EARLY 
 STAGES 
 
 DY the opening of the seventeenth 
 century the centralising bureau- 
 cratic monarchies were fairly established : 
 nay, in France at least, they were even 
 showing the birth of modern party- 
 government, which since — carried on, 
 indeed, under the veil of constitutional- 
 ism — has been the type of all modern 
 government. Richelieu — the Bismarck 
 of his time and country — begins the series 
 of prime ministers or real temporary 
 kings, who govern in the interest of class 
 society, not much encumbered and a 
 good deal protected by their cloaks, the 
 hereditary sham-kings. In England this 
 prime-ministership was more incomplete, 
 
MODERN SOCIETY 105 
 
 though men like Burleigh approached 
 the type. Elizabeth reduced the Tudor 
 monarchy to an absurdity, a very 
 burlesque of monarchy, under which 
 flourished rankly an utterly unprincipled 
 and corrupt struggle for the satisfaction 
 of individual ambition and greed. This 
 grew still more rankly, perhaps, under 
 James I., who added abject cowardice 
 to all the other vices which are more 
 common to arbitrary high place and 
 power. 
 
 As to the condition of the people 
 during the latter years of the sixteenth 
 and beginning of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, the economical and religious 
 revolution which had taken place had 
 oppressed them terribly, and the " free 
 workman " had to feel the full force 
 of the causes which had presented him 
 with his " freedom " in the interest of 
 growing commerce. In England, on 
 the one hand, the expropriation of the 
 yeomanry from the land and the con- 
 version of tillage into pasture had pro- 
 vided a large population of these free 
 labourers, who, on the other hand, were 
 not speedily worked up by the still scanty 
 
106 SOCIALISM 
 
 manufactures of the country, but made 
 a sort of semi-vagabond population, 
 troublesome enough to the upper and 
 middle classes. The laws made against 
 such paupers in the time of Henry 
 VIII. and Edward VI. were absolutely 
 ferocious, and men were hanged out of 
 the way by the thousand. 
 
 But in the reign of Elizabeth it was 
 found out that even this was not enough 
 to cure the evil, which of course had 
 been much aggravated by the suppres- 
 sion of the religious houses, part of 
 whose function was the housing and 
 feeding of any part of the workmen 
 temporarily displaced. A Poor Law, 
 therefore, was passed (1601) for dealing 
 with this misery, and, strange to say, it 
 was far more humane than might have 
 been expected from the way in which 
 the poor had been dealt with up to that 
 time ; so much so, indeed, that the 
 utilitarian philanthropists of the begin- 
 ning of this century felt ■ themselves 
 obliged to deal with it in a drastic 
 way, which left us a Poor Law as 
 inhumane as could well be. Toward 
 the middle of the seventeenth century 
 
MODERN SOCIETY 107 
 
 things began to improve with our work- 
 ing population : the growth of the 
 towns stimulated agriculture, and til- 
 lage began to revive again, though of 
 course under the new system of culti- 
 vation for profit. Matters were in 
 fact settling down, and preparing the 
 country by a time of something like 
 prosperity for the new revolution in 
 industry. 1 
 
 The condition of the people was 
 on the whole worse on the Continent 
 than in England. Serfdom was by no 
 means extinct in France, Hungary, or 
 Germany, and that serfdom was far 
 more burdensome and searching side 
 by side with the exploitation of the 
 market than it had been in the feudal 
 period. Other survivals of the mediaeval 
 epoch there were also — thus in Germany 
 the guilds had still some life and 
 power, and the people were not utterly 
 divorced from the land as in England, 
 although the predominant competition 
 of the markets destroyed much of the 
 good that lingered in these half-extinct 
 
 1 For a fuller exposition of this period Hyndman's 
 Historical Basis of Socialism in England may be consulted. 
 
108 SOCIALISM 
 
 customs. At the same time the popu- 
 lations were crushed by the frightful 
 wars which passed over them — in all 
 which religion was the immediate ex- 
 cuse. 
 
 The first of this series was the war 
 carried on in Holland and the Nether- 
 lands against the Catholic foreigners — 
 the Spaniards — into whose hands they 
 had been thrown by the family affairs of 
 the house of Austria. Although noble- 
 men took up the side of the rebels — e.g. 
 Egmont and Horn, executed for so 
 doing — this war was in the main a war 
 of the bourgeois democracy on behalf of 
 Protestantism, embittered by the feeling 
 of a Teutonic race against a Latinised 
 one. There is to be found in it even 
 some foretaste of the revolutionary sans- 
 cullote element, as shown by the eager- 
 ness with which the rebels took up the 
 nickname of gueux, or beggars, flung at 
 them in scorn by their foes, as well as by 
 the extreme bitterness of the ruder sea- 
 faring population, the men whose hats 
 bore the inscription, " Better Turk than 
 Pope." 
 
 In Germany the struggle known as 
 
MODERN SOCIETY 
 
 109 
 
 the " Thirty Years' War " was between 
 the two opposing parties amongst the 
 great vassals of the German Empire, 
 whose power was used for the aggran- 
 disement of the house of Austria, and 
 also for the enforcement of Catholi- 
 cism on the more northern countries. 
 The reader must not forget, moreover, 
 that these countries were to the full 
 as oppressively governed as those which 
 obeyed the bidding of the emperor. 
 This miserable war, after inflicting 
 the most terrible suffering on the un- 
 happy people, who were throughout 
 treated with far less mercy and con- 
 sideration than if they had been beasts, 
 after having crushed the rising intelli- 
 gence of Germany into a condition from 
 which it has only arisen in days close to 
 our own, dribbled out in a miserable 
 and aimless manner, leaving the limits 
 of Protestant and Catholic pretty much 
 where it had found them ; but it also 
 left the people quite defenceless against 
 their masters, the bureaucratic kings 
 and princes. 
 
 In France the religious struggle took 
 a very bitter form, but it was far more 
 
no SOCIALISM 
 
 political than in Germany. The leaders 
 were even prepared to change their creed 
 when driven into a corner — as Henry of 
 Navarre at the time of the Massacre of 
 St. Bartholomew. In France the popu- 
 lar sympathy was by no means in favour 
 of Protestantism : the Massacre of St. 
 Bartholomew, which inflicted such a 
 terrible blow on the Huguenot cause, 
 would otherwise have been hardly pos- 
 sible. It is true that the great Hugue- 
 not leader, Henry of Navarre, became 
 king of France, but his accession, the 
 result of his personal genius, did not 
 carry with it a Huguenot triumph as 
 a consequence. Henry had to abjure 
 Protestantism, — a Protestant King of 
 France was impossible. 
 
 The great struggle in England came 
 later, and probably in consequence the 
 victory was more decided on the Puritan 
 side. The enthusiasm with which Mary 
 Tudor — "Bloody Mary" — was received, 
 and the Catholic insurrections in the 
 reign of her successor, show that there 
 was at first some popular feeling on the 
 Catholic side ; but by the time of James 
 I., Catholicism was practically dead in 
 
MODERN SOCIETY in 
 
 England. 1 The Book of Sports issued 
 by his Government, which encouraged 
 the people to play various games on 
 Sunday after the fashion of the Middle 
 Ages, was widely received as an out- 
 rage on the feelings of the growing 
 middle class in town and country. We 
 have here the first manifestation of that 
 curious Sabbatarianism, which seems to 
 be confined to these islands, and the 
 origin of which is very obscure, since 
 the original Calvinists, such as John 
 Knox, and even Calvin himself, were 
 not enthralled by it. 
 
 The maritime power of England has 
 its beginning in the later Tudor period 
 in contrast to the Middle Ages, when 
 seafaring matters were of little national 
 importance in England, the carrying of 
 the northern seas being almost entirely 
 in the hands of the Flemings and the 
 Hansers. But under Elizabeth the 
 English seamen, gentlemen adventurers 
 and merchants, stimulated by the dis- 
 covery of America, the prosaic accounts 
 
 1 Yet the curious countryman's book called the Shepherd's 
 Calendar, translated and printed here first about 1520, was 
 reprinted literally, with all its Catholic prayers, etc., several 
 times till as late as 1656. 
 
i I2 SOCIALISM 
 
 of practical money - getting, and the 
 legends of fabulous wealth that there 
 awaited the fearless and boundless greed 
 of the new knight-errantry of com- 
 merce, fitted out ships for filibustering 
 expeditions to the New World. They 
 practically went to war on their own ac- 
 count with the Spaniards in that hemi- 
 sphere ; and there their reckless courage 
 and superior seamanship won for them 
 pretty much all the wealth which was 
 not fabulous, and laid the foundation 
 of the commercial enterprise of Eng- 
 land. By this they converted a people 
 once jovial, indolent, and generous into a 
 nation of sordid, if energetic traders and 
 restless money-getters, whose very cour- 
 age was the courage of the counting-house, 
 and the greater part of this was exercised 
 vicariously at the expense of their hard- 
 living employes by land and sea. 
 
 All was tending towards the irrecon- 
 cilable quarrel which took place in the 
 next reign between the court and the 
 bourgeoisie, and which was nearly as 
 much religious as political. 
 
 Meantime in France the last rem- 
 nants of the old feudalism struggled in 
 
MODERN SOCIETY 113 
 
 the party warfare of the " Fronde " 
 against Mazarin and his bureaucracy of 
 simple corruption. Finally Louis XIV. 
 put the coping-stone on the French 
 monarchy by forcing his nobility, high 
 and low, into the position of his cour- 
 tiers, while his minister Colbert developed 
 the kingdom as a tax-gathering machine 
 by the care and talent with which he 
 fostered the manufactures of France, 
 just before his time at a very low ebb 
 indeed. There was no need, therefore, 
 to touch the revenues of the nobility, 
 who were free to spend them in dancing 
 attendance on the court ; nay, were not 
 free to do otherwise. The century 
 began with the French monarchy tri- 
 umphant over all its great vassals ; it 
 finished by reducing all its vassals, great 
 and small, to the condition of courtiers, 
 with little influence in the country-side, 
 and diminished rents — mere absentee 
 landlords of the worst type, endowed 
 with privileges which could only be 
 exercised at the cost of the starvation of 
 the people, and the exasperation of the 
 bourgeoisie, who furnished the funds for 
 the court glory. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 PREPARATIONS FOR 
 REVOLUTION — ENGLAND 
 
 "IX/'E must here say a few words about 
 the meaning of the great struggle 
 which took place in England between the 
 King and the Parliament. The King, 
 Charles I., aimed at completing the 
 monarchical absolutism begun by the 
 Tudors, while at the same time his 
 course was clearer to him, because the 
 old feud between nobles and King had 
 quite died out, and, as before said, the 
 nobles, from being powerful and often 
 refractory feudal vassals, had become 
 mere courtiers whose aims and interest 
 were identified with those of the 
 monarch. On the other side stood 
 the bourgeoisie, who had thriven 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 115 
 
 enormously on the growing commerce, 
 were becoming powerful, and aiming 
 not merely at social and economical 
 freedom, but also at supremacy in the 
 State. To the bourgeoisie also adhered 
 the yeomen and the major part of the 
 country squires, to which group Crom- 
 well himself belonged. 
 
 The struggle began on the Parlia- 
 mentary side with the assertion of 
 the rights of Parliament, and the pro- 
 fession of an almost pedantic devotion 
 to the quasi - historical constitution, 
 which was, nevertheless, in the main a 
 figment of the period. Perhaps the 
 most constitutional act of the rebels 
 was the trial of the King for his life, one 
 precedent, at least, for which existed in 
 the condemnation of Edward II. But 
 as the Parliamentary struggle gave place 
 to civil war, and it became clear that 
 the rebels would be worsted unless the 
 bourgeoisie were given the leading part, 
 this sham - historical constitutionalism 
 gave place first to republicanism, with 
 an infusion of theocracy, and finally 
 to the dictatorship of the victorious 
 general, who in the end could scarcely 
 
u6 SOCIALISM 
 
 brook the thin veil of a nominally inde- 
 pendent Parliament. The effects of the 
 disappointment of the purist republicans, 
 like Colonel Hutchinson, were sternly 
 repressed, and still more so the little 
 spurts of rebellion tried by the religious 
 enthusiasts, amongst whom we must 
 count the Levellers, whose doctrines 
 included a commission of a similar 
 character to that put forward by John 
 of Leyden in the first half of the six- 
 teenth century. 
 
 It is worth noting, as illustrating 
 the growth of a widespread Puritanism 
 in England, which in fact embraced 
 the whole population, and which no 
 political change has much affected, 
 that both sides in the struggle were 
 steeped in Bible phrases and illustra- 
 tions, showing, amongst other things, 
 the extent to which the English version 
 was being read by the population. 
 
 On the other hand, the severity of 
 triumphant Puritanism, and the iron 
 rule of the Lord Protector, made 
 his government unpopular amongst a 
 people who have always resented harsh 
 mechanical organisation of any kind. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 117 
 
 The latitudinarians, always the most 
 numerous, became the most powerful, 
 and at last it was an easy matter for a 
 few ambitious self-seekers to bring 
 about the restoration of the hereditary 
 monarchy in Britain. 
 
 This restoration of the Stuart was, 
 however, after all but a makeshift put 
 up with because the defection from 
 the high-strung principle of the earlier 
 period of the revolution left nothing 
 to take the place of Cromwell's 
 absolutism. The nation was mainly out 
 of sympathy with the Court, which 
 was unnational and Catholic in ten- 
 dency, and quite openly debauched. 
 The nation itself, though it had got 
 rid of the severity of Puritanism, was 
 still Puritan, and welcomed the Sunday 
 Act of Charles II., which gave the due 
 legal stamp to Puritanism of the duller 
 and more respectable kind. But though 
 enthusiastic Puritanism was no longer 
 dominant, it was not extinct. John 
 Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress shines out, 
 though a religious romance, amidst the 
 dulness of the literature of the time. 
 The Quakers, who represented in their 
 
n8 SOCIALISM 
 
 beginning the peaceable and religious side 
 of the Levellers, arose and grew and 
 flourished in spite of persecution ; the 
 Cameronians in Scotland made an in- 
 effectual armed resistance to the dying 
 out of enthusiasm ; while across the 
 Atlantic the descendants of the earlier 
 Puritans carried on an almost theocratic 
 government, which, among other things 
 persecuted the Quakers most cruelly. 
 Little by little, however, all that was not 
 quite commonplace and perfunctory died 
 out in English Protestantism, and re- 
 spectable indifferentism had carried all 
 before it by the end of the century. 
 Politics and religion had no longer any 
 real bond of union, and the religious 
 side of Puritanism, Evangelicanism, dis- 
 appears here, to come to light again in 
 the next century under the leadership of 
 Whitfield. 
 
 English Puritanism had left behind 
 it a respectable, habitual, and formal 
 residuum strong enough to resent 
 James II. 's Papistry, and to make 
 its resentment felt ; while at the 
 same time the constitutionalism, which 
 began the anti-absolutist opposition in 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 119 
 
 Charles I.'s time, and which had 
 been interrupted by Cromwell's iron and 
 Charles II. 's mud absolutism, gathered 
 head again and soon assumed definite 
 form. The Stuart monarchy, with its 
 " divine right " of absolute sovereignty, 
 was driven from England in the 
 person of James II., a constitutional 
 king was found in William of Orange, 
 and constitutional party government 
 began. 
 
 Thus, in spite of interruption, was 
 carried out the middle-class revolution in 
 England ; like all other revolutions, it 
 arrived at the point which it really set 
 out to gain ; but not until it had shaken 
 off much which at one time helped for- 
 ward its progress, and which was and 
 still is mistaken for an essential part of it. 
 Religious and Republican enthusiasm, 
 although they (especially the former) 
 played their part in abolishing the re- 
 actionary clogs on the progress of the 
 middle classes, had to disappear as 
 elements which would have marred 
 the true historical end of that revolu- 
 tion ; to wit, the creation of a powerful 
 middle class freed from all restric- 
 
izo SOCIALISM 
 
 tions that would interfere with it in 
 its pursuit of individual profit, derived 
 from the exploitation of industry. 
 
 Thenceforth, till our own times, re- 
 spectable political life in England has 
 been wrapped up in whiggery ; tinged, on 
 one side, with the last faint remains of 
 feudalism in the form of a quite unreal 
 sentiment, involving no practical conse- 
 quences but the acceptance of the name 
 of Tory ; and on the other by as faint a 
 sentiment towards democracy, which was 
 probably rather a traditional survival of 
 the feeling of the old days of the struggle 
 between King and Parliament, than any 
 holding out of the hand towards the real 
 democracy that was silently forming 
 underneath the government of the re- 
 spectables. 
 
 The first part of the eighteenth century, 
 therefore, finds England solid and settled ; 
 all the old elements of disturbance and 
 aspiration hardened into constitutional 
 bureaucracy ; religion recognised as a 
 State formality, but having no influence 
 whatever on the corporate life of the 
 country, its sole reality a mere personal 
 sentiment, not at all burdensome to the 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 121 
 
 practical business of Jife ; the embers 
 of the absolutist re-action on the point of 
 extinction, and swept off easily and even 
 lazily when they make a show of being 
 dangerous ; the nobility a mere titled 
 upper order of the bourgeoisie ; the 
 country prosperous, gaining on French 
 and on Dutch in America and India, and 
 beginning to found its colonial and 
 foreign markets, and its navy fast becom- 
 ing paramount on all seas ; the work- 
 ing classes better off than at any time 
 since the fifteenth century, but hopeless, 
 dull, neither adventurous nor intellectual ; 
 Art, if not actually dead, represented by a 
 Court painter or so of ugly ladies and 
 stupid gentlemen (Sir Joshua the king 
 of the said painters) ; a literature pro- 
 duced by a few word-spinning essayists 
 and prosaic versifiers, like Addison and 
 Pope, priding themselves on a well-bred 
 contempt for whatever was manly or 
 passionate or elevating in the past of 
 their own language; while their devotion 
 to the classical times, derived from the 
 genuine and powerful enthusiasm of the 
 Renaissance, had sunk to nothing but a 
 genteel habit of expression. 
 
122 SOCIALISM 
 
 Here then in England we may begin 
 to see what the extinction of feudality 
 was to end in, for the time at least. 
 Mediaeval England is gone, the manners 
 and ways of thought of the people are 
 utterly changed ; they are called English, 
 but they are another people from that 
 which dwelt in England in the fifteenth 
 century when " forestalling and re- 
 grating " were misdemeanours ; when 
 the guild ruled over the production of 
 goods, and division of labour was not yet ; 
 when both in art and literature the people 
 had their share, — nay, when what ot 
 both there was, was produced by the 
 people themselves. Gone also is militant 
 Puritanism, buried deep under mountains 
 of cool formality. England is bourgeois 
 and successful throughout its whole life ; 
 without aspirations, for its self-satisfac- 
 tion is too complete for any, yet gather- 
 ing force for development of a new kind, 
 — as it were a nation taking breath for a 
 new spring. 
 
 For under its prosperous self-satisfac- 
 tion lies the birth of a great change — 
 a revolution in industry — and England 
 is at the time we are writing of simply 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 123 
 
 preparing herself for that change. Her 
 prosperity and solid bureaucratic con- 
 stitutional government — nay, even the 
 commonplace conditions of life in the 
 country, are enabling her to turn all 
 her attention towards this change, and 
 towards the development of the natural 
 resources in which she is so rich. 
 
 The fall of the feudal system, the 
 invasion of the individualist method 
 of producing goods, and of simple 
 exchange of commodities, were bound 
 to lead to the final development of 
 the epoch — the rise of the great machine 
 industries — and now the time for that 
 development is at hand. The growing 
 world -market is demanding more than 
 the transitional methods of production 
 can supply. 
 
 In matters political prejudice is giving 
 way to necessity, and all obstacles are 
 being rapidly cleared away before the 
 advent of a new epoch for labour ; an 
 epoch of which we may say that if no 
 great change were at hand for it in its 
 turn, it would have been the greatest 
 disaster that has ever happened to the 
 race of man. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 PREPARATIONS FOR 
 REVOLUTION — FRANCE 
 
 npHE civil war called the Fronde 
 ( 1 648-1 654) ushered in the period 
 of the Grand Monarque. Of this faction- 
 fight it should be noted that the bour- 
 geoisie, led by the Councils of lawyers 
 called Parliaments, who were at first on the 
 side of the Minister Mazarin, and were 
 used by him, were driven to take part with 
 the " Princes " who opposed him, and 
 who in their turn used them and flung 
 them away, after they had drawn the 
 chestnuts out of the fire for them ; the 
 Fronde, however, has its interest as being 
 the germ of the disaffection of the 
 middle classes with the nobility and 
 government. As we have said, Louis 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 125 
 
 XIV. succeeded in making the French 
 monarchy a pure autocratic bureaucracy, 
 completely centralised in the person of 
 the sovereign. This with an ambitious 
 King like Louis XIV. involved constant 
 war, for he felt himself bound to satisfy 
 his ideal of the necessary expansion of 
 the territory and influence of France, 
 which he looked upon as the absolute 
 property of the King. The general suc- 
 cess of Louis XIV. brought with it the 
 success of these wars of aggrandisement, 
 and France became very powerful during 
 his reign. 
 
 Under the rule of his minister 
 Colbert, industrialism in France was, 
 one may say, forced as in a hothouse. 
 Colbert developed the new modes of 
 production that were inevitably coming, 
 and thereby established the workshop, or 
 division of labour system, which is the 
 transition from handicraft to machine 
 production. He spared no pains or 
 energy in bringing this about. Often, 
 with more or less success, he drove an 
 industry forward artificially, as with the 
 silk and woollen manufactures. For he 
 was eager to win for France a foremost 
 
iz6 SOCIALISM 
 
 place in the world-market, which he 
 thought but the due accompaniment of 
 her monarchical glory ; and he knew 
 that without it that glory would have 
 died of starvation, since the taxes would 
 not have yielded the necessary food. It 
 is true that even in England growing 
 commercialism was subordinate to con- 
 stitutionalism, the English form of 
 bureaucracy ; but the idea was already 
 afoot there that the former was rather an 
 end than a means, whereas in France 
 commercialism was completely subordin- 
 ated to the glory of the autocratic 
 monarchy — a mere feeder of it. This 
 overshadowing of commerce by the 
 sovereign, and the irritation it caused to 
 the manufacturing bourgeoisie, was un- 
 doubtedly one of the causes of the re- 
 volution. 
 
 The religion of this period of the 
 " Grand Monarque " shows little more 
 than an ecclesiastical struggle between 
 Gallicanism on the one hand, which 
 claimed a feeble spark of independence 
 as regards Rome for the French Church, 
 and is represented by Fenelon and 
 Bossuet, and Jesuitry on the other hand, 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 127 
 
 which was the exponent of Roman 
 centralisation. The leading intelligence 
 of the time was on the Gallican side ; 
 but the king in the long run favoured 
 the Jesuits, as being the readier instru- 
 ments of his bureaucratic rule. Outside 
 this ecclesiastical quarrel there was no 
 life whatever in religion, except what was 
 shown by the existence of a few erratic 
 sects of mystics, like the Quietists and 
 Jansenists. The former of these may be 
 said to have put forward the complete 
 abnegation of humanity in the presence 
 of God, while the latter attempted a 
 revivification of the pietism of the 
 Catholic Church, accompanied by a 
 galvanism of the mediaeval faith in 
 miracle-working. Finally the advent of 
 the revolutionary writers, heralded by 
 Helvetius, Condillac, and others, and 
 culminating in the influence of Voltaire, 
 Rousseau, Diderot, and the Encyclo- 
 paedists, destroyed the last vestiges of 
 religious belief among the educated 
 classes of France. 
 
 Two struggles, we may mention, were 
 going on during the early reign of 
 Louis XV., — that with the Jesuits, with 
 
iz8 SOCIALISM 
 
 their bull Unigenitus, which declared 
 the necessity of uniformity with the 
 Roman See, in which the Parliaments 
 took the Gallican side, while the Court 
 generally took that of the Jesuits : and 
 the contest between King and parliaments 
 (law courts) for prestige and authority. 
 These parliaments were at first councils, 
 called by the King from his baronage to 
 give advice as to the laws of the realm. 
 The barons gradually fell out of them, 
 and the lawyers (probably their legal 
 assessors) took their place ; so that at the 
 time we speak of they were wholly com- 
 posed of professional lawyers. They had 
 been largely used by the kings for con- 
 solidating their power over the feudal 
 nobles, since they were in the habit of 
 deciding all doubtful points of customary 
 law in favour of the King : but by Louis 
 XV. 's time they had in fact become the 
 champions of the quasi -constitutional 
 rights of the respectable citizens from the 
 formally legal point of view, and were 
 invariably opposed on the one hand to 
 the Jesuits and on the other to the Free- 
 thinkers. 
 
 The Regency which succeeded to the 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 129 
 
 reign of Louis XIV. saw the definite 
 beginnings of the last corruption which 
 betokened the Revolution. The wars 
 of aggrandisement still went on but were 
 now generally unsuccessful ; the indus- 
 trialism set agoing by Colbert progressed 
 steadily ; but the profits to be gained 
 by it did not satisfy the more adventur- 
 ous spirits of the period, and the Regency 
 saw a curious exposition of stock-jobbery 
 before its time in the form of the Missis- 
 sippi scheme of Law, which had its 
 counterpart in England in the South-Sea 
 Bubble. It was a financing operation — 
 to get something out of nothing — 
 founded on the mercantile theory of 
 economy then current, which showed but 
 an imperfect knowledge of the industrial 
 revolution beginning under men's very 
 eyes, and assumed that the wealth of a 
 country consists in the amount of the 
 precious metals which it can retain. 
 This assumption, we may observe, is 
 curiously exemplified in the half-com- 
 mercial, half-buccaneering romances of 
 Defoe. 
 
 The free-thinkers before-named were 
 the essence of the bourgeois party from 
 
 K 
 
1 3 o SOCIALISM 
 
 its intellectual side, as the parliaments 
 were from the legal side. These two 
 elements formed all that there was of 
 opposition till the first mutterings of 
 definite revolution were heard, though of 
 course the importance of the thinkers was 
 out of all proportion to that of the lawyer- 
 parliaments. The accession of the once 
 Dauphin, now Louis XVI., to the throne, 
 was hailed by the philosophers, especially 
 as his calling Turgot to reform the finances 
 was justly considered a sign of his sin- 
 cerity. But his attempts in this direction 
 were frustrated by the Court oligarchy ; 
 and as a result the discontent of the 
 respectable bourgeois opposition became a 
 rallying-point for the elements of the actual 
 revolution ; for though it meant nothing 
 but intelligent conservatism, it formed a 
 screen behind which the true revolutionary 
 forces could gather for the attack on 
 privilege. 
 
 It is necessary to say something about 
 the literature and art of France before 
 the Revolution, because that country is 
 the especial exponent, particularly in art, 
 of the degradation which indicated the 
 rottenness of society. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 131 
 
 As in England, literature was formal 
 and stilted, and produced little except 
 worthlessly clever essays and still more 
 worthless verses that have no claim to be 
 called poetry. The French verse-makers, 
 however, aimed at something higher than 
 the English, and produced works which 
 depend on pomp and style for any claim 
 to attention they may have, and for the 
 rest are unreal and lifeless. Amidst them 
 all one name stands forward as represent- 
 ing some reality — Moliere, to wit. But 
 the life and genuineness of his comedies 
 serves to show the corruption of the times 
 as clearly as the dead classicalism of 
 Racine ; for he, the one man of genius 
 of the time, was driven into the ex- 
 pression of mere cynicism. In one re- 
 markable passage of his works he shows 
 a sympathy for the ballad-poetry of the 
 people, which, when noticed at all in 
 England at the same period, and even 
 much later, received a kind of indulgent 
 patronage rather than admiration. At 
 the same time, as there was a sham 
 tragedy current at this period, so also 
 there was a sham love of simplicity. 
 The ladies and gentlemen of the period 
 
1 32 SOCIALISM 
 
 ignored the real peasants who were the 
 miserable slaves of the French landlords, 
 and invented in their dramas, poems, and 
 pictures sham shepherds and peasants, 
 who were bundles of conscious unreality, 
 inane imitations of the later classics. 
 This literature and art would be indeed too 
 contemptible for mention, if it were not a 
 sign of a society rotting into revolution. 
 The fine arts, which had in the end of 
 the sixteenth century descended from the 
 expression of the people's faith and 
 aspirations into that of the fancy, in- 
 genuity, and whim of gifted individuals, 
 fell lower still. They lost every atom of 
 beauty and dignity, and retained little 
 even of the ingenuity of the earlier 
 Renaissance, becoming mere expensive 
 and pretentious though carefully-finished 
 upholstery, mere adjuncts of pomp and 
 state, the expression of the insolence of 
 riches and the complacency of respect- 
 ability. Once again it must be said of 
 the art, as of the general literature of the 
 period, that no reasonable man could 
 even bestow a passing glance at it but 
 for the incurable corruption of society 
 that it betokens. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 133 
 
 Here, then, we have in France a con- 
 trast to the state of things in England. 
 No constitutionalism was here ; nothing 
 but an absolutism despised even by the 
 privileged classes ; a government unable 
 to move in the direction of progress, even 
 when, as in the case of Louis XVI., its 
 head had a tendency to the intelligent con- 
 servatism above mentioned ; bankrupt 
 also amidst a people broken down, and a 
 commerce hampered by the exactions of 
 the hereditary privilege which was its sole 
 support ; discredited by unsuccessful wars, 
 so that the door was shut to its ambition 
 on that road ; at home it had to face 
 uneasily the new abstract ideas of liberty 
 and the rights of man. These ideas were 
 professed, indeed, by those who had an 
 interest in preserving the existing state of 
 things, but were listened to and pondered 
 over by people who found that state of 
 things unbearable. 
 
 The contrast between the condition of 
 England and France, produced in either 
 case by the unconscious development 
 toward essential change, is remarkable. 
 In England the material condition of 
 the country was good, under the regime 
 
134 SOCIALISM 
 
 of successful whiggery ; the middle 
 classes were prosperous and contented ; 
 the working classes were keeping their 
 heads above water in tolerable comfort, 
 and nothing was further from their 
 thoughts than that revolutionary change, 
 to which nevertheless they were drifting 
 swiftly but quietly. 
 
 On the other hand, France was im- 
 poverished by the long wars of the Grand 
 Monarch ; the lower classes were sunk in 
 misery obvious to the most superficial 
 observer. The commercial middle classes 
 were discontented and uneasy under the 
 pressure of the remains of feudalism, 
 which seemed to them to be still flourish- 
 ing, though it was but the lifeless trunk 
 of the old tree, already sapped by Louis 
 XIV. To crown all there was a spirit 
 of intellectual disaffection in the air. 
 The theories of liberty and rationalism, 
 though originally derived from English 
 thinkers, were developed and put into 
 literary form by the coterie of French 
 writers (already mentioned) who took 
 the name of Les Philosophes, and in this 
 form they produced far more effects than 
 they did in the country of their birth, 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 135 
 
 supplying the formulae of the actual 
 Revolution. The names of Voltaire and 
 Rousseau, even apart from the Encyclo- 
 paedists, show how eagerly the new theories 
 were being received. In short the whole 
 aspect of affairs was far more dramatic in 
 France than in England ; as was likely to 
 be the case, since in France the Revolution 
 was doomed to be primarily political, and 
 in England mainly industrial. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION : 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STAGE 
 
 HpHE bankruptcy towards which France 
 was staggering under the regime of 
 an untaxed privileged noblesse drove the 
 Court into the dangerous step of attempt- 
 ing to do something, and after desperate 
 efforts to carry on the old corruption by 
 means of financing operations under 
 Calonne and others, aided by an assembly 
 of the "Notables," which was a kind of 
 irregular taxing council, the Court was at 
 last compelled to summon the States- 
 General to meet on the 4th May 1789. 
 This was a body which was pretty much 
 analogous to a Parliament of our mediaeval 
 kings, that is little more than a machine 
 for levying taxes, but which attempted to 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 137 
 
 sell its fiscal powers to the King for 
 redress of certain grievances. This States- 
 General had not met since 16 14. Bicker- 
 ing between the three houses, — Clergy, 
 Noblesse, and Commons, — immediately 
 began, but the latter, which was middle- 
 class in spirit though including some of 
 the lower nobility, gave tokens of its 
 coming predominance from the first. On 
 the 20th of June the Court attempted a 
 coup d'etat, and the Third Estate held its 
 celebrated session in the Tennis Court, 
 and so broke with the old feudal idea, 
 and became the constituent " National 
 Assembly," the Court making a feeble 
 resistance at the time. 
 
 Concurrently with this legal and con- 
 stitutional movement came what M. 
 Taine well calls " the spontaneous an- 
 archy " of the peasants in the Provinces, 
 with which the attack of Reveillon's 
 Factory in Paris was in sympathy. The 
 King, Queen and Court expected to 
 put down these disturbances easily, but the 
 occurrences on the night of the Necker 
 demonstration, in which the French 
 guards (who had not hesitated to fire on 
 the Reveillon rioters) assisted the people 
 
1 38 SOCIALISM 
 
 against the cavalry called the Royal 
 German regiment, became an event which 
 really made an end of the hopes of the 
 Court of crushing the movement by 
 military force. 
 
 The next act of the popular revolution 
 was the taking of the Bastille: this 
 ancient castle was obnoxious to the 
 revolutionists for being from its earliest 
 foundation a royal fortress for the 
 repression of the vassals, and in its 
 later times had become a symbol of 
 royal privilege, and the prison where 
 the infamous lettres de cachet were 
 executed. 
 
 The slaying of Berthier and Foulon, the 
 types of fiscal extortioners, that followed 
 this event should be noted here as the 
 first example of that wild popular justice, 
 in which the element of revenge played 
 so great a part. 
 
 The Court gave way at once ; the 
 King visited Paris as a sign of submis- 
 sion, and certain of the higher nobility 
 fled from the coming ruin. 
 
 The ground thus cleared for it, the 
 Constitutional Revolution went on apace ; 
 feudal titles were abolished, the Church 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 139 
 
 reduced to a salaried official department ; 
 the very geography of the country was 
 changed, the old provinces with their 
 historic names abolished, and France 
 divided into eighty -three departments 
 called after the rivers and other natural 
 features ; everything was to be reduced 
 to a pattern, constitutional, centralised, 
 bourgeois, bureaucracy. 
 
 But the other element of revolution 
 was also stirring. The alliance of the 
 mere starvelings could not be done with- 
 out by the bourgeoisie, and they had it 
 whether they would or no. A Jacquerie 
 had arisen in the country, and armed 
 peasants everywhere burned the chateaux 
 or country-houses of the gentlemen, and 
 hunted away their occupants. The Re- 
 volution was necessarily accompanied by 
 the dislocation of all industry, aggravated 
 by bad harvests, and the scarcity was 
 bitterly felt everywhere. 
 
 In the midst of this the Court, re- 
 covering from the first blow of the taking 
 of the Bastille, began to plot counter- 
 revolution, and devised a scheme for 
 getting the King away from Versailles to 
 Rouen or elsewhere, and putting him at 
 
140 SOCIALISM 
 
 the head of a reactionary army and an 
 opposition reactionary Assembly. A ban- 
 quet given by the Court to a regiment 
 supposed to be loyal, practically exposed 
 this plot, and amidst all the terror 
 and irritation which it gave rise to, a 
 popular rising headed by the famous 
 march of the women on Versailles came 
 to the aid of the Assembly, and forced 
 the King to go to Paris and take up his 
 abode at the Tuileries. In this affair 
 the mere Sansculotte element became 
 very obvious. It was stirred up by the 
 artificial famine caused by the financial 
 and stock-jobbing operations of the Court, 
 and of private persons, the popular 
 middle -class minister, Necker, having 
 been the immediate cause of it by his 
 issue of small paper money. It was 
 opposed by the bourgeois soldiery, the 
 National Guard, headed by Lafayette, 
 who was the embodiment of the Consti- 
 tutional Revolution. This was followed 
 by a further flight of the noblesse and 
 higher bourgeoisie from France, which 
 flight, as it were, gave a token of the 
 complete victory of Constitutionalism 
 over the Court party. 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 141 
 
 For some time the King, or rather the 
 Queen and Court carried on a struggle 
 against the victorious middle classes, 
 apparently unconscious of its extreme 
 hopelessness; while the bourgeois govern- 
 ment for its part was quite prepared to 
 put down any popular movement, all the 
 more as it now had a formidable army in 
 the shape of the National Guard. But by 
 this time there had arisen a kind of People's 
 Parliament outside the Assembly, the 
 famous Jacobins Club and the Cordelier 
 Club to wit, and the sky was darkening 
 over for triumphant Constitutionalism. 
 
 That triumph was celebrated by the 
 great feast of the Champ de Mars, 13th 
 July 1790, when the King in the presence 
 of delegates from all France swore to the 
 Constitution. But Royalist plots went 
 on all the same, and settled down at last 
 into a fixed conclusion of the flight of the 
 King to the north-eastern frontier, where 
 were the remains of what regular army 
 could be depended on, with the threaten- 
 ing Austrian troops at their back. As a 
 trial the King attempted at Easter to get 
 as far as St. Cloud, announcing his de- 
 termination as a matter of course ; but 
 
142 SOCIALISM 
 
 he was stopped by a mixed crowd not 
 wholly Sansculotte, though Lafayette did 
 his best to help royalty turned quasi- 
 constitutional, in the pinch. At last on 
 the 20th June, the King and the royal 
 family made the great attempt, in which 
 they would most probably have suc- 
 ceeded, if they had not hampered them- 
 selves with all kinds of absurd appliances 
 of wealth and luxury, and if they had 
 had any idea of the kind of stake they 
 were playing for. As it was in spite of, 
 or perhaps partly because of, their having 
 arranged for various detachments of 
 troops to meet them on the way as 
 escorts, they were stopped at the little 
 town of Varennes and brought back again 
 to Paris. It was a token of the progress 
 of ideas, that by this time the King's 
 presence in Paris was looked at from a 
 twofold point of view. By the pure 
 constitutionalists as the necessary coping- 
 ing stone to the Constitution, without 
 which it could not stand; but by the 
 revolutionists as a hostage held by the 
 French people in the face of hostile 
 reactionary Europe. Also now the word 
 Republic was first put forward, and at 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 143 
 
 last it became clear that there were two 
 parties amongst those who were making 
 the Constitution, — the constitutional 
 Royalists and the Republicans. 
 
 The latter were supported by the 
 people, who flooded the Assembly with 
 petitions for the deposition of the King ; 
 the Assembly decided against it on the 
 ground of the legal fiction familiar to the 
 anti-Royalist party in our Parliamentary 
 wars, that the King had been carried off 
 by evil and traitorous councillors. But 
 the split between the parties was empha- 
 sised by bloodshed. A Jacobin petition 
 lay for signature on the altar of the 
 Country in the Champ de Mars, and 
 great crowds were about it signing and 
 looking on. In the evening Lafayette 
 marched on the Champ de Mars with a 
 body of National Guards, proclaimed 
 martial law by the hoisting of the red 
 flag, according to the recently made 
 enactment, and finally fired on the people, 
 killing many of them. 
 
 But in spite of this " massacre of the 
 Champ de Mars," the Constitutionalists 
 triumphed for a time. The National 
 Assembly completed its work, and pro- 
 
144 SOCIALISM 
 
 duced a constitution wholly bourgeois 
 and monarchical, which was accepted 
 by the King amidst one of those 
 curious outbursts of sentiment of which 
 the epoch was so fruitful, and which 
 generally, as on this occasion, included 
 the exhibition of the little Dauphin in 
 the arms of his mother to the crowd. 
 The National Assembly dissolved itself 
 after enacting that none of its members 
 could be elected to the new legislative 
 body or first Parliament of the Revolu- 
 tion. Of this Parliament the bourgeois 
 Republicans, the aristocracy of talent, 
 became apparently far the most powerful 
 party : whatever there was of talent that 
 had frankly accepted the alliance of the 
 Sansculottes was outside the Legislature. 
 But another element was now added to 
 the contest, that of foreign war, Austria 
 beginning the attack. The obvious and 
 necessary sympathy of the King and 
 Court with what had now become their 
 only chance of salvation, was met by the 
 equally necessary terror and indignation 
 of the revolutionists of all shades, which 
 of course strengthened the extreme party, 
 who had everything to lose from the 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 145 
 
 success of a foreign invasion. In spite of 
 this the King, driven into a corner, was 
 in constant contention with the Legis- 
 lature, and used his constitutional right 
 of veto freely, yet was driven to accept 
 a revolutionary Ministry with Roland at 
 its head ; but as the hope of deliverance 
 from the invasion grew on him he dis- 
 missed it again, and the Court found 
 itself ticketed with the name of the 
 Austrian Committee. On the 20th June 
 a popular demonstration invaded the 
 Tuileries, which was organised by the 
 Girondists (at that time the dominant 
 revolutionary party whom Louis was 
 attacking directly), an event that marked 
 the failure of the King's attempt to 
 reign constitutionally by means of party 
 government. 
 
 As a constitutional counter - stroke 
 Lafayette, quite misunderstanding his 
 strength, left the army, and tried to 
 stir up the Constitutionalists to attack 
 the Jacobins, but failed ignominiously, 
 and presently fled the country. The 
 King once more swearing to the Consti- 
 tution at the Feast of the Federates, 
 wore armour underneath his clothes, and 
 
146 socialism 
 
 insurrection was obviously brewing. The 
 Court fortified the Tuileries and gathered 
 about them whatever Royalist force was 
 available, including the Swiss Guard ; 
 and a desperate resistance was prepared 
 for with the faint hope of the King 
 being able to cut himself out and reach 
 the frontier ; but the i oth of August 
 ended the matter. Those Constitution- 
 alists who had any intention of support- 
 ing the Court found their hearts failing 
 them, and even the " constitutional " 
 battalions of the National Guard were 
 prepared to take the popular side. The 
 King and royal family left the Tuileries 
 for the Legislature, leaving no orders for 
 the unlucky Swiss, who with mechanical 
 military courage stood their ground. 
 The insurrectionary sections attacked 
 the Tuileries and carried it, though not 
 without heavy loss — 1200 killed, the 
 Swiss being all slain except a few who 
 were carried off to prison. On the 13th 
 August, the King and his family were 
 bestowed as prisoners in the Temple, and 
 the first act of the Revolution had come 
 to an end. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION : 
 THE PROLETARIAN STAGE 
 
 'T*HE insurrection of the ioth August, 
 which culminated in the final 
 downfall of the monarchy and the im- 
 prisonment of the King and royal family 
 in the Temple, was headed and organised 
 by a new body definitely revolutionary, 
 intended to be the expression of the 
 power of the proletariat, to wit, the 
 Commune of Paris, the moving spirit of 
 which was Marat, who even had a seat 
 of honour assigned to him in its hall. 
 Already, before the King had been sent 
 to the Temple, the Girondin Vergniaud, 
 as president, had moved the suspension 
 of the " hereditary representative " and 
 the summoning of a national Conven- 
 
148 SOCIALISM 
 
 tion. Danton was made minister of 
 justice; and a - new Court of Criminal 
 Justice was established for the trial of 
 political offences. The members of the 
 Convention were chosen by double elec- 
 tion, but the property qualification of 
 " active and passive citizens " was done 
 away with. 
 
 While all this was going on, the 
 movement of the reactionary armies on 
 France was still afoot ; and the furious 
 flame of French national enthusiasm, 
 which was afterwards used by the 
 self-seeking conqueror Napoleon, was 
 lighted by the necessity of the moment 
 — not to be extinguished in days long 
 after his. We mention this here because, 
 in order to appreciate what follows, it 
 must be remembered that an armed 
 coalition of the absolutist countries was 
 gathering together, threatening to drown 
 the Revolution in the blood of the 
 French people, and especially of the 
 people of Paris ; that one of its 
 armies, commanded by the Duke of 
 Brunswick, a famous general of Frede- 
 rick the Great, was already within a few 
 days' march of the city ; that nothing 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 149 
 
 was between Paris and destruction but 
 undisciplined levies and the rags of the 
 neglected army formed under the old 
 regime ; while at the same time the 
 famous royalist insurrection had broken 
 out in La Vendee. Every republican in 
 Paris, therefore, had good reason to feel 
 that both his own life and the future of 
 his country were in immediate danger at 
 the hands of those who did not care 
 what became of France and her people 
 so long as the monarchy could be re- 
 stored. 
 
 Danton now demanded a search for 
 arms, which was carried out on 29th 
 August ; and the prisons were filled with 
 prisoners suspected of royalist plotting, 
 and many of them surely guilty of it. 
 
 Verdun fell on the 2nd September, 
 and the Duke of Brunswick boasted that 
 he would presently dine in Paris ; and 
 on the same night the irregular trials 
 and slaughter of the prisoners in Paris, 
 known as the September Massacres, took 
 place. 
 
 The next day a circular was issued by 
 the Committee of Public Safety, approv- 
 ing of the massacre, signed by Sergent, 
 
150 SOCIALISM 
 
 Panis (Danton's friend), and Marat, with 
 seven others. 
 
 The Girondins in the Assembly and 
 elsewhere kept quiet for the time, though 
 they afterwards used the event against 
 the Jacobins. 
 
 Meanwhile the French army, under 
 Dumouriez, had seized on the woodland 
 hills of the Argonne, checked Brunswick, 
 defeated him at Valmy, and Paris was 
 saved. 
 
 The Convention now met — on the 
 20th September — and the parties of the 
 Girondins and the Mountain, or extreme 
 revolutionists, were at once formed in it. 
 It is noteworthy that while it declared 
 as its foundation the sovereignty of the 
 people and the abolition of royalty, it 
 also decreed that landed and other pro- 
 perty was sacred for ever. Apropos of 
 which, it may here be mentioned that 
 the bookseller Momoro, having hinted 
 at something like agrarian law, and some 
 faint shadow of Socialism, had to go into 
 hiding to avoid hanging. 
 
 So far, therefore, we have got no 
 further than the complete triumph of 
 bourgeois republicanism. The possi- 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 151 
 
 bility, notwithstanding, of its retaining 
 its position depended, as the event showed, 
 on the support of the proletariat, which 
 was only given on the terms that the 
 material condition of the workers should 
 be altered for the better by the new 
 regime. And those terms, in the long- 
 run, bourgeois republicanism could not 
 keep, and therefore it fell. 
 
 The Girondins or moderate party in 
 the Convention began their assault on 
 the Jacobins on the subject of the Sep- 
 tember Massacres, and also by attacking 
 Marat personally, which attack, how- 
 ever, failed egregiously. The Girondins, 
 as their name implies, leaned on the sup- 
 port of the provinces, where respectability 
 was stronger than in Paris, and tried to 
 levy a bodyguard for the defence of the 
 Convention against the Paris populace ; 
 but though they got the decree for it 
 passed, they could not carry it out. In 
 their character of political economists, 
 also, they resisted the imposing of a maxi- 
 mum price on grain, a measure which the 
 scarcity caused by the general disturb- 
 ance made imperative, if the proletariat 
 were to have any share in the advantages 
 
152 SOCIALISM 
 
 of the Revolution. In short, the Giron- 
 dins were obviously out of sympathy 
 with the mass of the people. 
 
 The trial of the King now came on, 
 and tested the Girondins in a fresh way ; 
 they mostly voted his death, but as if 
 driven to do so from a feeling that 
 opinion was against them, and that they 
 might as well have some credit for it. 
 Louis was beheaded on the 2 1 st January 
 1793, and as an immediate consequence 
 England and Spain declared war. But 
 this business of the King made a kind of 
 truce between the parties, which, how- 
 ever, soon came to an end. Marat was 
 the great object of attack, and on the 
 25th February 1793 he was decreed 
 accused on account of some passages 
 in his journal approving of the bread 
 riots which had taken place, and sug- 
 gesting the hanging of a forestaller or 
 two. On the other hand, on the 10th 
 March the section Bonconseil demanded 
 the arrest of the prominent Girondins. 
 Meantime, Danton had been trying all 
 along to keep the peace between the two 
 parties, but on 1st April the Girondins 
 accused him of complicity with Dumou- 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 153 
 
 riez, who had now fled over the frontier, 
 and so forced him into becoming one of 
 their most energetic enemies. The posi- 
 tion of the Girondins was now desperate. 
 On the 24th March Marat was acquitted 
 and brought back in triumph to the 
 Convention. 
 
 The Girondins got a packed com- 
 mittee of twelve appointed in the interest 
 of the Convention as against the Paris 
 sections. As an answer to this a central 
 committee of the sections was formed, 
 which on 31st May dominated the 
 Municipality (not loth to be so dealt 
 with) and surrounded the Convention 
 with troops. After an attempt on the 
 part of the Girondins to assert their 
 freedom of action, the Convention de- 
 creed them accused, and they were put 
 under arrest. They died afterwards, 
 some by the guillotine, some even more 
 miserably, within a few months ; but 
 their party is at an end from this date. 
 All that happened in the Convention 
 from this time to the fall of Robespierre 
 in "Thermidor" was the work of a few 
 revolutionists, each trying to keep level 
 with the proletarian instinct, and each 
 
154 SOCIALISM 
 
 falling in turn. They had not the key 
 to the great secret ; they were still bour- 
 geois, and still supposed that there must 
 necessarily be a propertiless proletariat 
 led by bourgeois, or at least served by 
 them ; they had not conceived the idea 
 of the extinction of classes, and the or- 
 ganisation of the people itself for its 
 own ends. 
 
 Marat's death at the hand of Charlotte 
 Corday, on 14th July, removed the only 
 real rival to Robespierre, and the only 
 man who could have modified the ex- 
 travagance of the Terror. 
 
 The law of maximum was now passed, 
 however, and a cumulative income tax, 
 so that, as Carlyle remarks, the workman 
 was at least better off under the Terror 
 than he had ever been before. 
 
 Robespierre, Danton, and the Hebert- 
 ists were now what of force was left in 
 the Convention, and the first of these 
 was not slow to make up his mind to get 
 the reins of power into his own hands. 
 Meantime, an attempt was made to 
 institute a new worship founded on 
 Materialism ; but, like all such artificial 
 attempts to establish what is naturally 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 155 
 
 the long growth of time, it failed. Chau- 
 mette, Hebert, and their followers were 
 the leaders in this business, which Robes- 
 pierre disapproved of, and Danton 
 growled at. 
 
 The Extraordinary Tribunal under 
 Fouquier Tinville, the agent of the 
 Terror, speedily got rid of all obstacles 
 to the Revolution, and of many of the 
 foremost rank of its supporters. Robes- 
 pierre became at last practical dictator, 
 partly owing to his adroit steering 
 between the parties, and his industry and 
 careful painstaking, and partly to his 
 reputation for incorruptibility and re- 
 publican asceticism. 
 
 The Hebertists, who were so called from 
 Hebert, their leader, and who represented 
 the proletarian instinct or germ of Social- 
 ism, under the name of the " Enrages " 
 (rabids), were accused at Robespierre's 
 instance, found guilty and executed. 
 Danton, giving way it would seem to 
 some impulse towards laziness inherent 
 in his nature, let himself be crushed, and 
 died along with Camille Desmoulins on 
 31st March 1794, and at last Robes- 
 pierre was both in reality and appearance 
 
156 SOCIALISM 
 
 supreme. On the 8th June he inaugur- 
 ated his new worship by his feast of 
 the Supreme Being, and two days later 
 got a law passed (the law Prairial) which 
 enabled him to condemn any one to the 
 guillotine at pleasure; and at this ominous 
 grumblings began to be heard. Accord- 
 ing to a story current, Carnot got by 
 accident at a list of forty to be arrested, 
 among whom he read his own name. 
 On the 26th July Robespierre was met 
 by unexpected opposition in the Con- 
 vention. The next day he was decreed 
 accused at the Convention, and Henriot 
 deposed from the commandership of the 
 National Guard ; but there was a respite 
 which a more ready man, a man of 
 military instinct at least, might have 
 used. Robespierre lacked that instinct ; 
 Henriot failed miserably in his attempt 
 to crush the Convention. The armed 
 sections of Paris, on being appealed to 
 by the Convention, wavered and gave 
 way, and Robespierre was arrested. In 
 fact, Robespierre seems to have worn 
 out the patience of the people by his 
 continued executions. Had he pro- 
 claimed an amnesty after his Feast of the 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 157 
 
 Supreme Being, he would probably have 
 had a longer lease of power ; as it was 
 he and his tail died on the 28th July. 
 
 There was nothing left to carry on the 
 Revolution after this but a knot of self- 
 seeking politicians of the usual type ; 
 they had only to keep matters going 
 until they were ready for the dictator 
 who could organise for his own purposes 
 people and army, and who came in the 
 shape of Napoleon. The proletarians 
 were no longer needed as allies, and dis- 
 united, ignorant of principles, and used 
 to trust to leaders, they could make no 
 head against the Society, which they had 
 shaken indeed, owing to its internal dis- 
 sensions, but which they were not yet 
 able to destroy. 
 
 One event only there remains to be 
 mentioned, the attempt of Baboeuf and 
 his followers to get a proletarian republic 
 recognised ; it has been called an insur- 
 rection, but it never came to that, being 
 crushed while it was yet only the be- 
 ginning of a propaganda. Baboeuf and 
 his followers were brought to trial in 
 April 1796. He and Darthes were 
 condemned to death, but killed them- 
 
158 SOCIALISM 
 
 selves before the sentence could be 
 carried out. Ten others were con- 
 demned to prison and exile ; and so 
 ended the first Socialist propaganda. 
 
 It is commonly said that Napoleon 
 crushed the Revolution, but what he 
 really did was to put on it the final seal 
 of law and order. The Revolution was 
 set on foot by the middle classes in 
 their own interests ; the sentence that 
 Napoleon accepted as the expression of 
 his aims, "la carriere ouverte aux talens" 
 — "the career thrown open to talent" — 
 is the motto of middle-class supremacy. 
 It implies the overthrow of aristocratic 
 privilege and the setting up in its place 
 of a money aristocracy, founded on the 
 privilege of exploitation, amidst a world 
 of so-called "free competition." The 
 middle -class, the first beginnings of 
 which we saw formed in mediaeval times, 
 after a long and violent struggle, has 
 conquered and is supreme from hence- 
 forth. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL 
 REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND 
 
 TN the last chapter, wherein the con- 
 dition of England was dealt with, 
 we left it a prosperous country, in the 
 ordinary sense of the word, under the rule 
 of an orderly constitutionalism. There 
 was no need here for the violent destruc- 
 tion of aristocratic privilege ; it was of 
 itself melting into money-privilege ; and 
 all was getting ready for the completest 
 and securest system of the plunder of 
 labour which the world has yet seen. 
 
 England was comparatively free in 
 the bourgeois sense ; there were far fewer 
 checks than in France to interfere with 
 the exaction of the tribute which labour 
 has to pay to property to be allowed 
 
160 SOCIALISM 
 
 to live. In a word, on the one hand, 
 exploitation was veiled ; and on the other, 
 the owners of property had no longer 
 any duties to perform in return for the 
 above-said tribute. Nevertheless, all this 
 had to go on on a small scale for a while. 
 Population had not increased largely 
 since the beginning of the seven- 
 teenth century ; agriculture was flourish- 
 ing ; one-thirtieth of the grain raised 
 was exported from England ; the work- 
 ing classes were not hard pressed, and 
 could not yet be bought and sold in 
 masses. There were no large manu- 
 facturing towns, and no need for them ; 
 the presence of the material to be worked 
 up, rather than the means for working 
 it mechanically — fuel, to wit — gave a 
 manufacturing character to this or that 
 country-side. It was, for example, the 
 sheep-pastures of the Yorkshire hill-sides, 
 and not the existence of coal beneath 
 them, which made the neighbourhood of 
 the northern Bradford a weaving country. 
 Its namesake on the Wiltshire Avon was 
 in those days at least as important a 
 centre of the clothing industry. The 
 broadcloth of the Gloucestershire valleys, 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 161 
 
 Devonshire and Hampshire kersies, 
 Witney blankets and Chipping Norton 
 tweeds, meant sweet grass and long wool, 
 with a little water-power, and not coal, to 
 turn the fulling-mills, to which material 
 to be worked up was to be brought from 
 the four quarters of the globe. 
 
 The apparent condition of labour in 
 those days seems almost idyllic, com- 
 pared with what it now is ; but it must 
 be remembered that then as now the 
 worker was in the hands of the mono- 
 polist of land and raw material ; nor was 
 it likely that the latter should have held 
 his special privilege for two hundred 
 years without applying some system 
 whereby to develop and increase it. 
 
 Between the period of the decay of the 
 craft-guilds and this latter half of the 
 eighteenth century there had grown up a 
 system of labour which could not have 
 been applied to the mediaeval workmen ; 
 for they worked for themselves and not 
 for a master or exploiter, and thus were 
 masters of their material, their tools 
 and their time. This system is that of 
 the Division of Labour ; under it the 
 unit of labour is not an individual man, 
 
 M 
 
2 
 
 
 i62 SOCIALISM 
 
 but a group, every member of which is 
 helpless by himself, but trained by con- 
 stant practice to the repetition of a small 
 part of the work, acquires great precision 
 and speed in its performance. In short, 
 each man is not so much a machine as a 
 part of a machine. For example, it 
 takes five men to make a glass bottle : 
 it is the group of these five men that 
 makes the bottle, not any one of them. 
 It is clear that under this system the 
 individual workman is entirely at the 
 mercy of his master the capitalist in his 
 capacity of superintender of labour : in 
 order not to be crushed by him, he 
 must combine to oppose his own interests 
 to those of his employer. 
 
 It was by this method, then, that the 
 demands of the growing world-market 
 were supplied down to the end of the 
 eighteenth century. The great political 
 economist, Adam Smith, whose book 
 was first published in 1 77 1, marks 
 the beginning of the transition be- 
 tween this system and that of the 
 great machine industries ; but his work 
 implies throughout the Division of 
 Labour system. 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 163 
 
 That system was now to melt into 
 the new one : the workman, from being 
 a machine, was to become the auxiliary 
 of a machine. The invention of the 
 spinning-jenny by Hargreaves in 1760 is 
 the first event of the beginning of this 
 Industrial Revolution. From thence to 
 the utilisation of steam as a motive-force, 
 and thence again to our own days, the 
 stream of invention has been continuous. 
 The discovery that iron could be made 
 with pit-coal removed the seat of the 
 iron manufacture from the wooded 
 countries of the south and west, where 
 the old iron-works, called " bloomeries," 
 used to be carried on, and in which wood 
 was the fuel used, to the northern and 
 midland coal districts, and all manufac- 
 ture of any importance flowed to the seat 
 of fuel ; so that South Lancashire, for in- 
 stance, was changed from a country of 
 moorland and pasture, with a few market 
 towns and the ancient manufacturing city 
 of Manchester, into a district where the 
 " villages," still so called, but with popu- 
 lations of from fifteen or twenty to 
 thirty thousand souls, are pretty much 
 contiguous, and the country has all but 
 
 
1 64 SOCIALISM 
 
 disappeared. Of course a great part of 
 this is the work of the years that have 
 followed on the invention of railways ; 
 but even in the earlier period of this in- 
 dustrial revolution the change was tre- 
 mendous and sudden, and the sufferings 
 of the working classes very great, as no 
 attempt was made to alleviate the distress 
 that was inevitably caused by the change 
 from the use of human hands to machin- 
 ery. Nor indeed could it have been 
 made in a country governed by bourgeois 
 constitutionalism until measures were 
 actually forced on the Government. 
 
 In 1 8 1 1 the prevailing distress was 
 betokened by the first outbreak of the 
 Luddites. These were organised bands 
 of men who went about breaking up 
 the machinery which was the immediate 
 cause of their want of employment and 
 consequent starvation. The locality 
 where these riots were most frequent 
 was the northern midland counties, where 
 the newly-invented stocking-frames were 
 specially obnoxious to them. The Lud- 
 dites became the type of bodies of 
 rioters who by a half- blind instinct 
 throughout this period threw themselves 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 165 
 
 against the advancing battalions of in- 
 dustrial revolution. 
 
 In 1 8 16, the year which followed the 
 peace with France, the cessation of all the 
 war industries threw still more people out 
 of employment, and in addition the harvest 
 was a specially bad one. As a consequence, 
 this hunger insurrection was particularly 
 vigorous in that year. The riots were 
 put down with corresponding violence, 
 and the rioters punished with the utmost 
 harshness. But as times mended some- 
 what, this insurrection, which was, as we 
 have said, a mere matter of hunger, and 
 was founded on no principle, died out, 
 although for a time riots having for their 
 object destruction of property, especially 
 of the plant and stock of manufacturers, 
 went on through the whole of the first 
 half of the century. The " Plug Riots," 1 
 in the middle of the Chartist agitation, 
 may be taken for an example of these. 
 
 It was a necessary consequence of the 
 introduction of elaborate machinery that 
 women and children should be largely 
 employed in factories to diminish the 
 
 1 This meant destruction of boilers in factories, the rioters 
 pulling out the plugs to ensure their bursting. 
 
166 SOCIALISM 
 
 number of adult males. This resource 
 for the development of the profits of the 
 new system was used by the manufac- 
 turers with the utmost recklessness, till 
 at last it became clear to the bourgeois 
 government that the scandal created by 
 its abuse would put an end to its use 
 altogether, unless something were done 
 to palliate its immediate evils. Ac- 
 cordingly a series of Factory Acts were 
 passed, in the teeth of the most strenuous 
 and unscrupulous resistance on the part 
 of the capitalists, who grudged the im- 
 mediate loss which resulted in the ham- 
 pering of the " roaring trade " they were 
 driving, even though it were for the 
 ultimate benefit of their class. The first 
 of these Acts which was really intended 
 to work was passed in 1830, and they 
 were consolidated finally in 1867. It 
 should be understood that they were 
 not, Inte nded "to benefit the great mass 
 of adult workers, but were rather con- 
 cessions to the outcry of the philan- 
 thropists at the condition of the women 
 and children so employed. 
 
 It must be remembered also that the 
 political conflict between the landed 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 167 
 
 gentry and the manufacturers forced on 
 this reform. 
 
 Meanwhile, in spite of all the suffering 
 caused by the Industrial Revolution, it 
 was impossible for the capitalists to en- 
 gross the whole of the profits gained by 
 it, or at least to go on piling them up 
 in an ever -increasing ratio. The class 
 struggle took another form, besides that 
 of mere hunger riots and forcible re- 
 pression, the Trades Unions to wit. 
 Although the primary intention of these 
 was the foundation of benefit societies, 
 which had been one of the practical uses 
 to which the guilds of the early Middle 
 Ages had been put, like them also they 
 had at last to take in hand matters deal- 
 ing with the regulation of labour. 
 
 The first struggles of the trades unions 
 with capital took place while they were 
 still illegal ; but the repeal of the law 
 against the combination of workmen in 
 1 824 set them partially free inthat respect, 
 and they soon began to be a power in the 
 country. Aided by the rising tide of 
 commercial prosperity, which made the 
 capitalists more willing to yield up some 
 part of their enormous profits rather than 
 
i68 SOCIALISM 
 
 carry on the struggle a foutrance, they 
 prevailed in many trade contests, and 
 succeeding in raising the standard of 
 livelihood for skilled workmen, though 
 of course in ridiculous disproportion to 
 the huge increase in the sum of the 
 national income. Further than this it 
 was and is impossible for them to go, so 
 long as they recognise the capitalists as a 
 necessary part of the organisation of 
 labour. It was not at first understood 
 by the capitalist class that they did so 
 recognise* them, and consequently in the 
 period of their early successes the trades 
 unions were considered rather as danger- 
 ous revolutionists than as a part of the 
 capitalist system, which was their real 
 position, and were treated to that kind 
 of virulent and cowardly abuse and insult 
 which the shopkeeper in terror for his 
 shop always has at his tongue's end. 
 
 The abolition of the corn-laws in 1 846 
 and the consequent cheapening of 
 necessary food for the workers, the dis- 
 covery of gold in California and Australia, 
 the prodigious increase in the luxury and 
 expenditure of the upper and middle 
 classes, all the action and reaction of the 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 169 
 
 commercial impulse created by the great 
 machine industries, gave an appearance 
 of general prosperity to the country, in 
 which, as we have said, the skilled work- 
 men did partake to a certain extent ; and 
 the views of middle-class optimists as to 
 the continuance of bourgeois progress, 
 and the gradual absorption of all the 
 " thrifty and industrious ' part of the 
 working classes into its ranks seemed 
 confirmed until within the last few years ; 
 all the more as the practical triumph of 
 the Liberal party had ceased to make 
 " politics " a burning question. Never- 
 theless, as a sign that the underground 
 lava had not ceased flowing, it was 
 noticed that ever since the ripening of 
 the great industries, in periods of about 
 ten years came recurring depressions 
 of trade. These were accounted for in 
 various ingenious ways, but otherwise did 
 not trouble the capitalist mind, which got 
 to consider this also, because of its regular 
 recurrence, to be a sign of the stability 
 of the present system, merely looking 
 upon it as something to be taken into the 
 general average and insured against in the 
 usual manner. But within the last few 
 
170 SOCIALISM 
 
 years this latest eternal bourgeois provi- 
 dence has failed us. In spite of the last 
 partial revival of trade, depression dogs 
 us with closer persistence. The nations 
 whom we assumed would never do any- 
 thing but provide us with raw materials, 
 have become our rivals in manufacture, 
 and our competitors in the world-market ; 
 while owing to the fact that America has 
 enormous stretches of easily tilled virgin 
 soil, which does not need manure, and 
 that the climate of India makes it easy to 
 support life there, those two countries 
 supply us with such large amounts of 
 grain, and at so cheap a rate, that raising 
 it in England has become unprofitable ; 
 hence the farmers are poor, and the 
 landlords cannot get the same rents 
 for agricultural land as formerly. The 
 exports have fallen off; towns where a 
 dozen years ago trade was flourishing 
 and wages high, are now encumbered 
 with a population which they cannot find 
 employment for ; and though from time 
 to time there are rumours of improve- 
 ment in trade, little comes of them, 
 and people are obliged to await some 
 stroke of magic that shall bring us 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 171 
 
 back our old prosperity " of leaps and 
 bounds." A new commercial revolu- 
 tion has been for some time supple- 
 menting the first one, and we are now 
 in the epoch of the perfecting of the 
 machines invented in the earlier years of 
 the great industry. Its result is the con- 
 densation of cognate businesses and vastly 
 improved organisation of production. 
 This means the gradual extinction of 
 the " merchant " or middleman between 
 the manufacturer and the retail dealer, and 
 lastly and especially an extremely rapid 
 progress in the supplanting of hand in- 
 dustry by machinery ; so that the time 
 seems not far distant when handicraft 
 will have entirely ceased to exist in the 
 production of utilities. 
 
 The fact is that the commerce of the 
 great industries has entered insensibly 
 into its second stage, and sheer cut- 
 throat competition between the different 
 nations has taken the place of the bene- 
 volent commercial despotism of the only 
 nation which was thoroughly prepared to 
 take advantage of the first stages of Indus- 
 trial Revolution — Great Britain, to wit. 
 
 This second stage is assuredly prepar- 
 
172 SOCIALISM 
 
 ing the final one, which will end with the 
 death of the whole bourgeois commercial 
 system. Meanwhile, what is the real 
 social product of the Industrial Revolu- 
 tion ? We answer the final triumph of 
 the middle classes, materially, intellectu- 
 ally, and morally. As the result of the 
 great political revolution in France was 
 the abolition of aristocratic privilege, and 
 the domination in the world of politics 
 of the bourgeoisie, which hitherto had 
 had little to do with it, so the English 
 Industrial Revolution may be said to 
 have created a new commercial middle 
 class hitherto unknown to the world. 
 This class on the one hand consolidated 
 all the groups of the middle class of the 
 preceding epoch, such as country squires, 
 large and small, big farmers, merchants, 
 manufacturers, shopkeepers, and pro- 
 fessional men ; and made them so 
 conscious of their solidarity, that the 
 ordinary refined and thinking man of 
 to-day cannot really see any other class 
 at all, but only, outside his own class, 
 certain heterogeneous groups to be used 
 as instruments for the further advance- 
 ment of that class. On the other hand, 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 173 
 
 it has attained such complete domination 
 that the upper classes are merely adjuncts 
 to it and servants of it. In fact, these 
 also are now of the bourgeoisie, as 
 they are all engaged in commerce in one 
 way or other : thus the higher nobility 
 are all either house-agents, spirit mer- 
 chants, coal -factors, or company -pro- 
 moters, and would be of no importance 
 without their " businesses." Moreover, 
 striving ever to extend itself downwards 
 as well as upwards, the middle class has 
 absorbed so much in that direction, 
 especially within the last thirty years, 
 that it has now nothing left below it 
 except the mere propertiless proletariat. 
 These last are wholly dependent upon it, 
 utterly powerless before it, until the break 
 up of the system that has created it 
 (the signs of whose beginning we have 
 just noted), shall force them into a revolt 
 against it. In the course of that revolt 
 this great middle class will in its turn 
 be absorbed into the proletariat, which 
 will form a new society in which classes 
 shall have ceased to exist. This is the next 
 Revolution, as inevitable, as inexorable, 
 as the rising of to-morrow's sun. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS IN 
 ENGLAND 
 
 QURING the French Revolution, 
 especially during its earlier stages, 
 there was a corresponding movement in 
 England. This was partly an intellectual 
 matter, led by a few aristocrats — like 
 the Earl of Stanhope — and had no 
 connection with the life of the people ; 
 it was rather a piece of aristocratic 
 Bohemianism, a tendency to which has 
 been seen in various times, even our 
 own. But it was partly a popular 
 ferment in sympathy with the general 
 spirit of the French Revolution, was 
 widespread, and was looked upon as 
 dangerous by the Government, who 
 repressed the agitation with a high- 
 
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS 175 
 
 handed severity which would seem almost 
 incredible in our times. 
 
 The French Revolution naturally 
 brought about a great reaction, not only 
 in absolutist countries, but also in Eng- 
 land, the country of Constitutionalism ; 
 and this reaction was much furthered 
 and confirmed by the fall of Napoleon 
 and the restoration of the Bourbons in 
 France, and all the doings and incapaci- 
 ties of the Holy Alliance. We may 
 take as representative names of this 
 reaction the Austrian Prince Metternich 
 on the Continent and Lord Castlereagh 
 in England. The stupid and ferocious 
 repression of the governments acting 
 under this influence, as well as the limit- 
 less corruption by which they were 
 supported, were met in England by a 
 corresponding progressive agitation, which 
 was the beginning of Radicalism. Bur- 
 dett and Cartwright are representatives 
 of the early days of this agitation, and 
 later on Hunt, Carlile, Lovett, and 
 others. William Cobbett must also be 
 mentioned as belonging to this period — 
 a man of great literary capacity of a 
 kind, and with flashes of insight as to 
 
176 SOCIALISM 
 
 social matters far before his time, but 
 clouded by violent irrational prejudices 
 and prodigious egotism ; withal a peasant 
 rather than a literary man of cultivation 
 — a powerful disruptive agent, but in- 
 capable of association with others. 
 
 This period of Radical agitation was 
 marked by a piece of violent repression 
 in the shape of the so-called Peterloo 
 Massacre (1819), where an unarmed 
 crowd at a strictly political meeting was 
 charged and cut down by the yeomanry, 
 and eleven people killed outright. 1 
 
 At last, when the country was on the 
 verge of civil war, the Reform Act of 
 1832 secured the practically complete 
 political emancipation of the new middle 
 class, which then at once quietly settled 
 down and deserted the proletariat, al- 
 though the latter had given both its 
 numbers and its blood to aid it in its 
 struggle for political freedom. 
 
 Consequently this agitation, which was 
 
 1 The improvement in our political position since the end 
 of the eighteenth century is sufficiently shown by such 
 examples as those of John Frost, Winterbotham, William 
 Cobbett, and others, who were fined heavily and imprisoned 
 for the simple expression of opinions that carried with them 
 not the least intention of incitement to revolt. 
 
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS 177 
 
 partly middle - class and partly popular, 
 was succeeded by the further demands of 
 the proletariat for freedom, in the Chartist 
 movement, which was almost exclusively 
 supported by the people, though some of 
 the leaders — as Feargus O'Connor and 
 Ernest Jones — belonged to the middle 
 class. Chartism, on the face of it, was 
 nearly as much a political movement as the 
 earlier Radical one ; its programme was 
 largely directed towards parliamentary 
 reform ; but, as we have said, it was a 
 popular movement, and its first motive 
 power was the special temporary suffering 
 of the people, due to the disturbance of 
 labour caused by the growth of the 
 machine industry. The electoral and 
 parliamentary reforms of its programme 
 were put forward because it was supposed 
 that if they were carried ultimately, they 
 would affect the material condition of the 
 working classes : at the same time, how- 
 ever, there is no doubt that the pressure 
 of hunger and misery gave rise to other 
 hopes besides the above-mentioned de- 
 lusion as to reform, and ideas of Social- 
 ism were current among the Chartists, 
 though they were not openly put for- 
 
 N 
 
178 SOCIALISM 
 
 ward on their programme. 1 Accordingly 
 the class-instinct of the bourgeoisie saw 
 the social danger that lurked under the 
 apparently political claims of the charter, 
 and so far from its receiving any of the 
 middle-class sympathy which had been 
 accorded to the Radical agitation, Chart- 
 ism was looked upon as the enemy, and 
 the bourgeois progressive movement was 
 sedulously held aloof from it. It is 
 worthy of note that Chartism was mainly 
 a growth of the Midland and Northern 
 Counties — that is, of the great manu- 
 facturing districts newly created — and 
 that it never really flourished in London. 
 In Birmingham the movement had the 
 greatest force, and serious riots took 
 place there while a Chartist conference 
 was sitting in the town. The move- 
 ment gave birth to a good deal of 
 popular literature, especially considering 
 that the press was very strictly controlled 
 by the Government. 
 
 The Chartist movement went on vigor- 
 ously enough in the Northern and Mid- 
 
 1 The term Socialists was at this time used to indicate 
 the Utopian Co-operationists, who were blindly opposed to all 
 political movement. There was far more Socialism in our 
 sense of the word amongst the ranks of the Chartists. 
 
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 179 
 
 land Counties ; but, as stated, it never 
 took much hold on London and the 
 South, where there was opposition be- 
 tween the skilled and unskilled work- 
 men, the former belonging to the trades 
 mostly carried on by handicraft. In the 
 North the industrial revolution which 
 had produced the factory had mainly 
 done away with this distinction. The 
 insufficiency of its aims, and of knowledge 
 how to effect them, at last found out the 
 weak places in Chartism. The Chartists 
 were mostly, and necessarily so, quite 
 ignorant of the meaning and scope of 
 Socialism ; and the economical develop- 
 ment was not enough advanced to show 
 the real and permanent cause of the indus- 
 trial distress. With the first amelioration 
 of that distress therefore the Chartist party 
 fell to pieces. But the immediate ex- 
 ternal cause of its wreck was the unfor- 
 tunate schism that arose between the 
 supporters of moral force and physical 
 force in the body itself. For the rest 
 it seems clear enough to us that they had 
 little chance of succeeding on consti- 
 tutional lines, considering the immense 
 amount of resistance (not all consti- 
 
180 SOCIALISM 
 
 tutional) with which their demands were 
 met. The historical function of the 
 movement was to express the intense 
 discontent of the working classes with 
 the then state of things ; and to pass on 
 the tradition to our own days. 
 
 It may here be mentioned that the 
 trump -card which the Chartists were 
 always thinking of playing was the 
 organisation of an universal strike, under 
 the picturesque title of the Sacred Month. 
 In considering the enormous difficulties, 
 or rather impossibilities of this enterprise, 
 we should remember that its supporters 
 understood that the beginnings of it 
 would be at once repressed forcibly, and 
 that it would lead directly to civil war. 
 
 From 1842, when the above schism 
 came to a head, Chartism began to die 
 out. Its decay, however, was far more 
 due to the change that was coming 
 over the economical state of affairs 
 than even to its incomplete development 
 of principle and ill-considered tactics. 
 Things were settling down from the dis- 
 location caused by the rise of the great 
 industries. Apart from the fact that the 
 Chartists were gradually worn out by 
 
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS 181 
 
 the long struggle, the working people 
 shared in the added wealth brought 
 about by the enormous expansion of 
 trade, however small that share was ; 
 and in consequence became more con- 
 tented. The trades unions began to 
 recover from the disasters of 1834, and 
 improved the prospects of the skilled 
 workmen. So-called co-operation began 
 to flourish : it was really an improved 
 form of joint -stockery, which could 
 be engaged in by the workmen, but 
 was and is fondly thought by some to 
 be, if not a shoeing-horn to Socialism, 
 at least a substitute for it ; indeed 
 Chartism itself in the end became in- 
 volved in a kind of half co-operative, 
 half peasant-proprietorship land scheme, 
 which of course proved utterly abortive. 
 
 As the improvement- in the condition 
 of the working classes weakened that 
 part of the life of Chartism that de- 
 pended on mere hunger desperation, so 
 the growing political power of the 
 middle classes and the collapse of the 
 Tory reaction swallowed up the political 
 side of its life. 
 
 Chartism, therefore, flickered out in 
 
1 82 SOCIALISM 
 
 the years that followed 1842, but its 
 last act was the celebrated abortive 
 threat at revolt which took place in 
 April 1848. And it must be said that 
 there was something appropriate in such 
 a last act. For this demonstration was 
 distinctly caused by sympathy with the 
 attacks on absolutism then taking place 
 on the Continent, and Chartism was 
 always on one side of it a phase of the 
 movement which was going on all over 
 Europe, a movement directed against 
 the reaction which followed on the 
 French Revolution, as represented by 
 the "Holy Alliance" of the absolutist 
 sovereigns against both bourgeoisie and 
 people. 
 
 On the fall of Chartism, the Liberal 
 party — which as an engine of progress 
 was a party without principles or 
 definition, but has been used as a 
 thoroughly adequate expression of Eng- 
 lish middle -class hypocrisy, cowardice, 
 and short-sightedness — engrossed the 
 whole of the political progressive move- 
 ment in England, and dragged the 
 working classes along with it, blind as 
 they were to their own interests and the 
 
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS 183 
 
 solidarity of labour. This party has 
 shown little or no sympathy for the 
 progressive movement on the Continent, 
 unless when it deemed it connected with 
 current anti-Catholic prejudice. It saw 
 no danger in the Cassarism which took 
 the place of the corrupt Constitutionalism 
 of Louis Philippe as the head of the 
 police and stock -jobbing regime that 
 dominated France in the interests of the 
 bourgeoisie, and it hailed Louis Napoleon 
 with delight as the champion of law and 
 order. 
 
 Any one, even a thoughtful person, 
 might have been excused for thinking in 
 the years that followed on 1 848 that the 
 party of the people was at last ex- 
 tinguished in England, and that the class 
 struggle had died out and given place to 
 the peaceable rule of the middle classes, 
 scarcely disturbed by occasional bicker- 
 ings carried on in a lawful manner 
 between Capital and Labour. But, 
 under all this, Socialism was making 
 great strides and developing a new and 
 scientific phase, which at last resulted in 
 the establishment of the International 
 Association, whose aim was to unite the 
 
1 84 SOCIALISM 
 
 workers of the world in an organisation 
 which should consciously oppose itself 
 to the domination of capitalism. 
 
 The International was inaugurated in 
 England in 1864, at a meeting held in 
 St. Martin's Hall, London, at which 
 Professor Beesly took the chair. It made 
 considerable progress among the Trades 
 Unions, and produced a great impression 
 (beyond indeed what its genuine strength 
 warranted) on the arbitrary Governments 
 of Europe. It culminated as to the 
 Socialistic influence it had, in the 
 Commune of Paris, of which we shall 
 treat in a separate chapter. The 
 International did not long outlive the 
 Commune, and once more for several 
 years all proletarian influence was 
 dormant in England, except for what 
 activity was possible among the foreign 
 refugees living there, with whom some 
 few of the English working men had 
 relations. In the year 1 8 8 1 ,* an attempt 
 was made to federate the various Radical 
 clubs of London under the name of the 
 
 1 Since the history of this part of the movement is so 
 recent that it cannot at present be written in any detail, the 
 authors think, it advisable not to mention personal names. 
 
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS 185 
 
 Democratic Federation. Part of the 
 heterogeneous elements, mainly the mere 
 political radicals, of which this was com- 
 posed, withdrew from it in 1883 ; but 
 other elements, connected with the literary 
 and intellectual side of Socialism, joined 
 it, and soon after the body declared for 
 unqualified Socialism, and took the name 
 of the Social Democratic Federation. 
 This was the first appearance of modern 
 or scientific Socialism in England, and 
 on these grounds excited considerable 
 public attention, though the movement, 
 being then almost wholly intellectual and 
 literary, had not at that time reached the 
 masses. 
 
 Differences of opinion, chiefly on 
 points of temporary tactics, caused a 
 schism in the body, and a rival, the 
 Socialist League, was formed, both 
 Societies carrying on an active socialist 
 propaganda, and in process of time often 
 acting in concert. The West-end riots 
 on Monday 8th February 1886, and the 
 consequent trial of four members of the 
 Social Democratic Federation, brought 
 the two organisations much together. A 
 good many branches both of the Federa- 
 
1 86 SOCIALISM 
 
 tion and the League were founded 
 and carried on with various fortunes. 
 But in the year 1890 dissensions in 
 the League, caused by a considerable 
 anarchistic element, broke it up. In 
 the meantime the Fabian Society, which 
 took form as a Socialist body about 
 the same time as the League, has been 
 actively engaged in propaganda, directing 
 its efforts chiefly to forcing existing 
 political parties to take notice of social 
 questions ; and largely also to educating 
 middle-class persons in Socialism. There 
 are other bodies more or less independent, 
 scattered up and down the country, 
 amongst whom may be mentioned the 
 Bristol Socialists, Societies in Aberdeen 
 and Glasgow, and the Hammersmith 
 Socialist Society, the latter being an off- 
 shoot of the Socialist League. It must 
 not, however, be supposed that the 
 spread of Socialistic doctrine is, in any 
 way, confined to the areas surrounding 
 these local centres of propaganda ; on 
 the other hand, its influence will be 
 clearly discernible throughout every in- 
 dustrial community. In spite of mis- 
 haps and disputes the movement has 
 
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS 187 
 
 taken root in England, and Socialism is 
 beginning to be understood by the work- 
 ing classes at large, the Socialistic instinct 
 being now obvious in all strikes and trade 
 disputes, and having caused the growth of 
 a new unionism based on a frank recogni- 
 tion of the class struggle. And, moreover, 
 the governing classes have been forced to 
 turn their attention to the condition of 
 the workers, so that Parliament, however 
 unwillingly, can no longer ignore their 
 demands as a class, and all existing parties 
 are bidding for their favour and votes. 
 In fact, what has happened to the Socialist 
 agitation is that which happens in all 
 movements beginning with insignificant 
 minorities. If it has lost somewhat for 
 the present in intention, it has gained 
 enormously in extension, and only awaits 
 increased education and the force of 
 inevitable economic events for it to 
 become general as an opinion ; the result 
 of which will be a corporate action, 
 destined to carry the evolution of modern 
 life into the next great stage — the realisa- 
 tion of a new society with new politics, 
 ethics, and economics, in short, the trans- 
 formation of Civilisation into Socialism. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 » 
 
 REACTION AND REVOLUTION 
 ON THE CONTINENT 
 
 VX^HEN the great war which Napo- 
 leon waged against Europe came 
 to an end by his defeat and ruin, France 
 was once more handed over to the 
 Bourbons, and Europe, as we have 
 already seen, fell into the arms of 
 reaction and sheer absolutism. The 
 Holy Alliance, or union of reactionary 
 monarchs, undertook the enterprise of 
 crushing out all popular fed'mg y or 
 even anything that could be supposed 
 to represent it in the person of the 
 bourgeois. 
 
 But the French Revolution had shaken 
 absolutism too sorely for this enterprise 
 to have more than a very partial success 
 
REACTION AND REVOLUTION 189 
 
 even on the surface. The power of 
 absolutism was undermined by various 
 revolutionary societies, mostly (so-called) 
 secret, which attracted to them a great 
 body of sympathy, and in consequence 
 seemed far more numerous and im- 
 mediately dangerous than they really 
 were. Still there was a great mass of 
 discontent, mostly political in character, 
 and by no means confined to the poorer 
 classes. 
 
 This discontent went on gathering 
 head, till in 1830, and again in 1848, it 
 exploded into open revolt against auto- 
 cracy all over Europe. This revolt, we 
 must repeat, was in the main a mere 
 counter-stroke to the reaction that was 
 diligently striving to restore the aristo- 
 cratic privilege which the French Revolu- 
 tion had abolished, and to maintain what 
 of it had escaped its attack. In 1830 the 
 revolt was purely bourgeois in character, 
 and was in no sense social, but, as above 
 said, political. In 1848 it had in some 
 places a strong infusion of the proletarian 
 element, which, however, was dominated 
 by middle -class patriotism and ideas 
 which led to the assertion and consolida- 
 
190 SOCIALISM 
 
 tion of nationalities. This has gone on 
 ever since, and the feeling still exists and 
 in some cases is even rampant. Poland, 
 Hungary, Italy, Servia, Ireland, and 
 France, as represented by her Chauvinists, 
 have all once and again contributed their 
 quotas to this nuisance of " Patriotism," 
 which has so often in these latter days 
 dragged the red herring over the path of 
 the Revolution. 
 
 But a new element was present in these 
 latter revolutionary movements, though 
 at first it did not seem to influence their 
 action much. This was the first appear- 
 ance in politics of modern or scientific 
 Socialism, in the shape of the Communist 
 Manifesto of Marx and Engels, first 
 published in 1 847. The rise and develop- 
 ment of this phase will be dealt with in 
 detail further on ; at present we can do 
 no more than call attention to the steady 
 and continuous influence of this last-born 
 Socialism, compared with the rapid ex- 
 tinction of Babceuf 's propaganda, although 
 he had a numerous body of adherents ; 
 for this fact marks a very great ad- 
 vance since the end of the eighteenth 
 century. 
 
REACTION AND REVOLUTION 191 
 
 The general effect, however, at least 
 as seen openly, of these insurrections was 
 little more than the shaking of abso- 
 lutism and the supplanting of it in various 
 degrees by middle-class constitutionalism ; 
 and also, as aforesaid, an added impulse 
 toward the consolidation of nationalities, 
 which later on produced the unification 
 of Italy and of Germany, and the asser- 
 tion of the independence of the Hun- 
 garian state. 
 
 In France the outward effects of the 
 insurrection were most obvious and lasted 
 the longest ; but the bourgeois institution 
 that took the place of Louis Philippe's 
 corrupt monarchy asserted itself tyranni- 
 cally enough against the proletariat, 
 and in consequence had no strength 
 left to meet the political adventurer 
 Louis Napoleon, whose plot against 
 the republic received just as much 
 resistance as gave him an excuse for the 
 massacre of 4th December 1851, by 
 means of which he terrorised France for 
 many years. Notwithstanding, as to 
 numbers it was quite insignificant com- 
 pared with the slaughter which followed 
 the taking of Paris by the bourgeois 
 
192 SOCIALISM 
 
 troops at the time of the fall of the 
 Commune in 1871. 
 
 This successful stroke had really no 
 relation to any foregoing reactionary 
 dictatorship. It even professed to be 
 founded on democratic feeling, though 
 as a matter of fact it was the expression 
 of the non-political side of bourgeois life 
 — the social and commercial side — the 
 ideal of the shopkeeper grown weary of 
 revolutions and anxious to be let alone 
 to make money and enjoy himself 
 vulgarly. Accordingly France settled 
 down into a period of " law and order," 
 characterised by the most shameless cor- 
 ruption and repulsive shoddy splendour. 
 She got at last into full swing of the 
 rule of successful stock-jobbery, already 
 established in England, and carried it 
 on with less hypocrisy than ourselves, 
 and consequently with more open black- 
 guardism. 
 
 To sustain this regime various showy 
 military enterprises were undertaken, 
 some of which it was attempted to invest 
 with a kind of democratic sentiment. 
 It was also of some importance to make 
 at least a show of giving employment to 
 
REACTION AND REVOLUTION 193 
 
 the working classes of France. This 
 principally took the form of the rebuild- 
 ing of Paris and the restoration, or 
 vulgarisation, of the mediaeval cathedrals 
 and public buildings, in which France 
 is richer than any other country ; so that 
 this apotheosis of middle-class vulgarity 
 has left abiding tokens of its presence in 
 a loss that can never be repaired. Yet 
 in spite of this militarism and the attempt 
 to gain the support of the proletarians 
 by gifts of " bread and pageants," dis- 
 content of various kind sprang up and 
 steadily increased. Moreover, the new 
 birth of Socialism was beginning to bear 
 fruit ; the Communistic propaganda got 
 firm hold of the city proletariat of France. 
 Socialism was steadily preached in Paris 
 at La Villette and Belleville, the latter, 
 originally laid out and built upon as an 
 elegant suburb for rich bourgeois, having 
 proved a failure, and become a purely 
 workman's quarter in consequence. 
 
 While all this was going on as it 
 were underground, the Cassarism of the 
 stock -exchange was also beginning to 
 get the worst of it in the game of state- 
 craft, until at last the results of the 
 
 o 
 
i 9 4 SOCIALISM 
 
 consolidation of nationalities, which was 
 the chief aim of the bourgeois revolt of 
 1848, became obvious in the revival of 
 the old animosities between Germany and 
 France. Bismarck, who had become the 
 attorney-dictator of Germany, had got to 
 know the weakness of the showy empire 
 of Louis Napoleon, and had a well war- 
 ranted confidence in that carefully elabor- 
 ated machine, the Prussian army. He 
 laid a trap for the French Caesar, who 
 fell into it, perhaps not blindly, but 
 rather driven by a kind of gambler's last 
 hope, akin to despair. 
 
 A great race war followed, the natural 
 and inevitable outcome of which was the 
 hopeless defeat of the French army, led 
 as it was by self-seekers and corrupt 
 scoundrels of the worst kind, most of 
 whom lacked even that lowest form of 
 honour which makes a Dugald Dalgetty 
 faithful to the colours under which he 
 marches. The Second Empire was swept 
 away. The new Republic proclaimed 
 after the collapse of Sedan still kept 
 up a hopeless resistance to the unbroken 
 strength of Germany — hopeless, since the 
 corruption of the Empire still lived on in 
 
REACTION AND REVOLUTION 195 
 
 the bourgeois republic, as typified in the 
 person of the political gamester, Gambetta. 
 Paris was invested, and taken after a long 
 resistance that reflected infinite credit 
 on the general population, who bore the 
 misery of the siege with prodigious patience 
 and courage, but no less disgrace on those 
 who pretended to organise its defence, 
 but who were really far more inclined to 
 hand over the city to the Germans than 
 allow it to gain a victory under the 
 auspices of the proletariat. 
 
 AH this must be looked upon by 
 Socialists as merely the prelude to the 
 great drama of the Commune, whose 
 aims and influence will form the subject 
 of another chapter. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 187 1, 
 AND THE CONTINENTAL 
 MOVEMENT FOLLOWING IT 
 
 TN dealing with the great event of the 
 Paris Commune, we must take for 
 granted a knowledge of the facts, which 
 are to be found in Lissagaray's work, 
 now translated into English by Mrs. 
 Aveling. 
 
 As we have stated before, the Inter- 
 national was founded in 1864, under 
 the leadership of Beesly, Marx, and 
 Odger. In 1869, at the Congress of 
 Basel, Marx drew it into the compass 
 of Socialism ; and though in England 
 it still remained an indefinite labour - 
 body, on the Continent it became at 
 once decidedly Socialistic and revolu- 
 
THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871 197 
 
 tionary, and its influence was very 
 considerable. 
 
 The progress of Socialism and the 
 spreading feeling of the solidarity of 
 labour was very clearly shown by the 
 noble protest made by the German 
 Socialists 1 against the war with France, 
 in the teeth of a " patriotic " feeling so 
 strong in appearance that it might have 
 been expected to silence any objectors 
 from the first. The result of the war 
 seemed to offer at least a chance for 
 action to the rapidly increasing Socialist 
 party, if they could manage to take 
 advantage of it, and get into their hands 
 the political power ; accordingly under 
 guidance of the International, the French 
 Socialists determined to take action if an 
 immediate opportunity offered. Neither 
 did the opportunity fail. The final de- 
 feat of the French army at Sedan brought 
 on the fall of the Empire, when Repub- 
 lican France might perhaps have made 
 terms with the invaders, whom the men 
 of the Empire had challenged. But a 
 resistance was organised by Gambetta, at 
 
 1 They also protested, at the end of the war, against the 
 annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. 
 
198 SOCIALISM 
 
 the head of a stock-jobbing clique, whose 
 interests, both commercial and political, 
 forbade them to let the war die out, lest 
 they should find themselves face to face 
 with a people determined to be fleeced 
 no longer. In saying the above we do 
 not deny that this sham patriotism was 
 backed up by a wave of genuine patriotic 
 enthusiasm common to the whole people. 
 The resistance, however, was always quite 
 hopeless from a military point of view, and 
 brought the country to the verge of ruin. 
 It also necessarily involved the German 
 siege of Paris, the result of which was to 
 throw a great deal of power into the 
 hands of the city proletariat, since they 
 at least were in earnest in their opposition 
 to the foreign enemy, and the theatrical 
 resistance necessary to the ambition of 
 the political adventurers who posed as 
 their leaders could not have had a decent 
 face to put upon it without their enthus- 
 iasm. In October, while the siege was 
 still at its height, a rising headed by 
 \Blanqui nearly succeeded in overthrowing 
 the bourgeois domination ; and after the 
 siege the possession of arms, especially 
 cannon, by the proletariat, in the face 
 
THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871 199 
 
 of the disarmed and disorganised army 
 under the bourgeois, afforded the oppor- 
 tunity desired by the Socialists. On the 
 failure of Thiers' attempt to disarm Paris 
 — whether he expected it to succeed, or 
 only designed it as a trap to enable him 
 to fall with force of arms on the city we 
 will not decide — on this failure the insur- 
 rection took place, and the Central Com- 
 mittee, largely composed of members of 
 the International, got into their own hands 
 the executive power, a great deal of which 
 they retained during the whole existence 
 of the Commune. Their position was 
 strengthened by the fact that, apart from 
 their aims towards the economical freedom 
 of the proletariat, they were, in their 
 aspirations towards genuine federalisation, 
 in appearance at least, in accord with the 
 Radicals who wished to see an advanced 
 municipalism brought about. 
 
 As the movement progressed, it be- 
 came more and more obvious that if the 
 resistance to Thiers and the attempt to 
 establish municipal independence for 
 Paris was to succeed, it must be through 
 the exercise of Socialist influence on the 
 proletariat : the Radicals, therefore, were 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 200 SOCIALISM 
 
 forced by the march of events into 
 alliance with the Socialists. The Social- 
 ist element therefore came to the front, 
 and enactments of a distinctly Socialistic 
 nature were passed, involving the suspen- 
 sion of contract, abolition of rents, and 
 confiscation of means of production ; and 
 both in these matters and in the decen- 
 tralisation which was almost the watch- 
 word of the Commune, the advance from 
 the proceedings of the earlier revolution- 
 ists is clearly marked. Also, although 
 the opportunity for the establishment of 
 the Commune was given by the struggle 
 against foreigners, the international 
 character of its aspirations was shown 
 by the presence of foreigners in its 
 Council, in its offices, and in com- 
 mand of its troops. And though in 
 itself the destruction of the Vendome 
 Column may seem but a small matter, 
 yet considering the importance attached 
 generally, and in France particularly, to 
 such symbols, the dismounting of that 
 base piece of Napoleonic upholstery was 
 another mark of the determination to 
 hold no parley with the old jingo legends. 
 It should be noted that the risings 
 

 THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871 201 
 
 that took place in other towns in 
 France were not so much vanquished by 
 the strength of the bourgeoisie, which at 
 first found itself powerless before the 
 people, but rather fell through owing to 
 a want of a fuller development of Social- 
 ism and a more vigorous proclamation of 
 its principles. 
 
 The whole revolt was at last drowned 
 in the blood of the workers of Paris. 
 Certainly the immediate result was to 
 crush Socialism for the time by the de- 
 struction of a whole generation of its 
 most determined recruits. Nevertheless 
 the very violence and excess of the 
 bourgeois revenge have, as we can now 
 see, tended to strengthen the progress of 
 Socialism, as they have set the seal of 
 tragedy and heroism on the mixed events 
 of the Commune, and made its memory 
 a rallying-point for all future revolution- 
 ists. 
 
 The fall of the Commune naturally 
 involved that of the International. The 
 immediate failure of its action was 
 obvious, and blinded people to its inde- 
 structible principles. Besides, a period of 
 great commercial prosperity visited the 
 

 202 SOCIALISM 
 
 countries of Europe at this time. The 
 French milliards which Germany had 
 won as the prize of war were being 
 turned over and over by the German 
 bourgeois in their merry game of " beg- 
 gar-my-neighbour." It was a time now 
 called by the German middle classes them- 
 selves the " swindle period." England 
 was at the height of her era of " leaps 
 and bounds." Even France, in spite 
 of her being the plundered country, 
 recovered from the condition into 
 which the war had thrown her with 
 a speed that made the plunderer envy 
 her. In short, it was one of those 
 periods which prove to the bourgeois 
 exploiter that he is positively right, in 
 which the bettermost workman grows 
 quite unconscious of the chain that 
 binds him, and is contemptuously re- 
 gardless of that which lies heavy on the 
 labourer below him, to whom the pros- 
 perity or adversity of the rest of the 
 world makes little or no difference. 
 
 Internal dissensions, also, were at 
 work within the International, and at 
 the Congress of the Hague in 1872 it 
 was broken up ; for though it still 
 
THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871 203 
 
 existed as a name for the next year or 
 two, the remaining fragments of it did 
 nothing worth speaking of. 
 
 In Vienna, in 1871, the movement 
 in sympathy with the Commune became 
 threatening, but was repressed by the 
 authorities, and several of the prominent 
 members of the party were imprisoned 
 for the part they had taken in a Socialist 
 demonstration — amongst others, Johann 
 Most and Andreas Scheu. 
 
 For a while after the fall of the Com- 
 mune the interest in the active side of 
 the movement turns to Germany and 
 Russia. In 1878 Nobiling and Hodel 
 shot at the Emperor William ; which 
 event gave the occasion for the attack 
 by Bismarck on the rapidly increasing 
 Socialist party in October 1878, when 
 the repressive laws were enacted which 
 were maintained up to 1890. 
 
 The remarkable organisation of the 
 German Socialist party calls here for 
 some notice. Socialism owes its origin 
 in Germany to the Workman's Party 
 founded by Ferdinand Lasalle in 1862. 
 Lasalle was one of those Semitic 
 geniuses of huge learning and untiring 
 
2o 4 SOCIALISM 
 
 energy who occasionally spring up to 
 astonish the world. He started the 
 party on a basis of State Socialism involv- 
 ing the resumption by the people of their 
 rights in the land, and there was gener- 
 ally a strong infusion of nationalism in 
 his scheme. Although in the beginning 
 his party excited great enthusiasm, at 
 his death in 1 864 it only numbered about 
 five thousand avowed adherents. Four 
 years afterwards the body came under the 
 influence of the International and of Marx, 
 owing to the zeal of Bebel and Liebnecht. 
 Up to the Congress of Eisenach in 1869 
 the Lasalle party and that of Marx were 
 at daggers drawn. At Gotha in 1875 
 by a fusion of the two parties the 
 present Social Democratic Party was 
 founded. Since then that party has 
 steadily grown, till it now numbers more 
 than a million and a half of adherents. 
 Owing to this rapid progress and its 
 practical organisation the German party 
 must be said to have taken the lead in 
 Socialism since the time of the Commune. 
 In Russia the Socialist movement was, 
 on the face of it, mixed up with nation- 
 alist and political agitation, which was 
 
THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871 205 
 
 natural in a country in the bonds of the 
 crudest form of absolutism. Neverthe- 
 less the ultimate aim of the party is un- 
 mistakable, and the propaganda has been 
 carried on with a revolutionary fervour 
 and purity of devotion which have never 
 been surpassed, if they have ever been 
 equalled. The slaying of the Czar on 
 13th March 1881, with the tragic scenes 
 that followed it, has been the most dra- 
 matic event that the Russian movement 
 has given to the world. The courage 
 and devotion that went to the accom- 
 plishment of this lightning stroke, and 
 the fact that it was directed against the 
 acknowledged representative of reaction- 
 ary oppression, has had great effect on 
 progressively - minded persons by the 
 mere force of sympathy, and has directed 
 men's thoughts very much to the struggles 
 of the Russians against the tyranny which 
 throttles them. 
 

 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE UTOPISTS : OWEN, SAINT 
 SIMON, AND FOURIER 
 
 TT is now necessary for us to turn for 
 a while from the political progress 
 of Socialism, to note the school of 
 thinkers who preceded the birth of 
 modern scientific or revolutionary 
 Socialism. These men thought it pos- 
 sible to regenerate Society by laying 
 before it its shortcomings, follies, and 
 injustice, and by teaching through pre- 
 cept and example certain schemes of 
 reconstruction built up from the aspir- 
 ations and insight of the teachers 
 themselves. They had not learned to 
 recognise the sequence of events that 
 forces social changes on mankind 
 whether they are conscious of its force 
 
THE UTOPISTS 207 
 
 or not, but believed that their schemes 
 would win their way to general adop- 
 tion by men's perception of their inher- 
 ent reasonableness. They hoped to 
 convert people to Socialism, to accept- 
 ing it consciously and formally, by 
 showing them the contrast between the 
 confusion and misery of civilisation, and 
 the order and happiness of the world 
 which they foresaw. 
 
 From the elaborate and detailed 
 schemes of future Society which they 
 built up they have been called the 
 Utopists. The representatives of the 
 different phases of this school are three 
 most remarkable men, born within a 
 few years of each other, whose aspira- 
 tions and insight did, in their day, a very 
 great deal to further the progress of 
 Socialism, in spite of the incompleteness 
 of their views. 
 
 Robert Owen was born at Newtown, 
 Montgomeryshire, in 177 1, of a lower 
 middle-class family. He became a suc- 
 cessful manufacturer through his own 
 industry and quick-wittedness in the 
 beginning of the rise of the Great 
 Machine Industries, when " manufac- 
 
208 SOCIALISM 
 
 turing " was advancing " by leaps and 
 bounds." He was a born philanthropist 
 in the better sense of the word, and 
 from the first showed in all matters 
 unbounded generosity and magna- 
 nimity. In the year 1800, when he 
 was not yet thirty, he became the 
 manager of the New Lanark Mills, 
 and set to work on his first great 
 experiment, which was briefly the con- 
 version of a miserable, stupid, and 
 vicious set of people into a happy, 
 industrious, and orderly community, 
 acting on the theory that man is the 
 creature of his surroundings, and that 
 by diligent attention to the development 
 of his nature he can be brought to per- 
 fection. In this experiment he was 
 entirely successful, but it was not in 
 him to stop there, as the plain words 
 he said of his success showed clearly 
 enough : " Yet these men were my 
 slaves." * He took part in all kinds 
 of projects of a philanthropic nature, 
 still founding all his action on his 
 
 1 In 1806, when owing to the rise in cotton he could 
 not continue manufacturing, he stopped the mills and paid 
 his people their full wages till he could go on again in four 
 months' time, a proceeding that cost him £7000. 
 
THE UTOPISTS 
 
 209 
 
 theory of the perfectibility of man by 
 the amelioration of his surroundings, 
 and became the first great champion 
 of co-operation, although he did not 
 suppose, as the co-operators of the pre- 
 sent day do, that anything short of uni- 
 versal co-operation would solve the 
 social question. In 18 15 he pressed 
 a meeting of Glasgow manufacturers to 
 petition Parliament to shorten the hours 
 of labour in the cotton mills, and the 
 change which he experienced from the 
 approbation of the governing classes to 
 their reprobation, may very well date 
 from that proceeding, as a bourgeois 
 biographer of his hints. But he still 
 kept his position as a popular philan- 
 thropist, even after his declaration in 
 favour of co-operation, until he at last 
 cut himself off from respectability by 
 openly attacking Respectability through 
 its received religion (21st August 18 16), 
 from which date onward he was scouted 
 by all that " Society," of which he was 
 now the declared enemy. But he was 
 in nowise daunted. In 1823 he pro- 
 posed communistic villages as a remedy 
 for the distress in Ireland. He estab- 
 

 
 zio SOCIALISM 
 
 lished, in 1832, an exchange in Gray's 
 Inn Road, in which labour was equit- 
 ably exchanged against labour ; in 
 1825 he bought New Harmony from 
 a community already established there 
 (the Rappites), and made his great 
 experiment in living in common ; and 
 late in life he published his Book of the 
 New Moral World, which contains the 
 exposition of his doctrine. 
 
 It will be thus seen that he was 
 unwearied in practical experiments. 
 His shortcoming was the necessary one 
 of the Utopist, — a total disregard of 
 the political side of progress. He failed 
 to see that his experiments, useful as 
 they were from that point of view, could 
 never develop out of the experimental 
 stage as long as the constitution of 
 Society implies the upholding of the so- 
 called " rights of property." He ignored 
 also the antagonism of classes which 
 necessarily exists under this system, and 
 which in the long run must bring about 
 the Socialism that he, the most generous 
 and best of men, spent his whole life in 
 attempting to realise. He died in 1858. 
 
 Saint Simon was born of a noble 
 
THE UTOPISTS 211 
 
 family at Paris in 1760. He acquired 
 and ran through a fortune, deliberately 
 experimenting in the various forms of 
 " life " from extravagance to abject 
 poverty. There was in him none of 
 that tendency to practical experiment 
 in quasi-Socialistic schemes which char- 
 acterised Robert Owen. His philo- 
 sophy was mingled with a mysticism 
 which had a tendency to increase — a 
 tendency to form a new religion rather 
 than to realise a new condition of life — 
 and which was carried into the absurdi- 
 ties of a kind of worship by his imme- 
 diate followers, more or less imitated by 
 the Positivists of our own day, whose 
 founder, Auguste Comte, was his most 
 cherished disciple. His Socialism was 
 of a vague kind, and admitted the exist- 
 ence of classes of talent as expressed by 
 the motto of Saint Simonism, " From 
 each according to his capacity ; to each 
 according to his deeds." In spite, how- 
 ever, of the tendency to mysticism, he 
 showed singular flashes of insight in 
 matters historical and economic, and 
 intellectually was certainly ahead of 
 Robert Owen. He may be said to 
 
212 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 
 have set himself the task of learning all 
 life by whatever means and at whatever 
 expense, in order to devote himself to 
 the new religion, " whose great aim is 
 the swiftest possible amelioration of the 
 moral and physical condition of the 
 poorest and most numerous class." 
 
 Frederick. Engels well says of him : 
 " As early as his Letters from Geneva, 
 Saint Simon laid down that all men 
 ought to work, and that the Reign of 
 Terror had been the reign of the non- 
 possessing masses. To face the fact in 
 1802 that the French Revolution was a 
 struggle between the noblesse, the bour- 
 geoisie, and the non-possessing classes 
 was a discovery of genius. In 18 16 
 he asserted that politics were but the 
 science of production, and predicted 
 their absorption by economy. The 
 knowledge that economic conditions 
 serve as the base of political institu- 
 tions only shows itself here in the 
 germ ; nevertheless, this proposition 
 contains clearly the conversion of the 
 political government of men into an 
 administration of things and a direction 
 of the process of production 5 that is to 
 
THE UTOPISTS 213 
 
 say, the abolition of the State, of which 
 such a noise has since been made." 
 
 Internationalism also was clearly enun- 
 ciated by Saint Simon. We quote Engels 
 again : " With an equal superiority 
 over the views of his contemporaries, 
 he declared in 18 14, immediately after 
 the entry of the allies into Paris, and 
 again imi8i5, during the war of the 
 hundred days, that the sole guarantee 
 of the peace and prosperous development 
 of Europe, was an alliance between 
 France and England, and of those two 
 countries with Germany. Certainly it 
 needed a courage by no means common 
 to preach to the French of 1 8 1 5 alliance 
 with the victors at Waterloo." 
 
 It is worth noting that one of the 
 schemes of the Saint Simonians, which 
 was most ridiculed at the time, was the 
 cutting of the Isthmuses of Suez and 
 Panama, and that M. de Lesseps was a 
 Saint Simonian. 
 
 Saint Simon died in great poverty in 
 1825, with words of hope for the future 
 of the party on his lips. 
 
 Charles Fourier was born in 1772 at 
 Lyons ; his father was a draper. He 
 
 
214 SOCIALISM 
 
 lost his property in the Revolution, and 
 afterwards went into business as a 
 broker. Amidst his dealings with Society, 
 he was early struck by the shortcomings 
 and injustices of individualism and com- 
 petition. / In his first book, The Theory 
 of the Pour 'Movements, he elaborates 
 the proposition that human nature is 
 perfectible through the free play of the 
 appetites and passions, and asserts that 
 misery and vice spring from the re- 
 straints imposed by Society7[ His criti- 
 cism of modern Society is most valuable 
 as anticipating that of scientific Social- 
 ism ; unlike his contemporaries he has 
 an insight into the historical growth 
 of mankind : " He divides it into four 
 periods of development, Savagery, Bar- 
 barism, Patriarchalism, and Civilisation, 
 meaning by the latter the Bourgeois Civil- 
 isation." 1 His saying, " In civilisation 
 poverty is born even of superabundance," 
 may well be noted in these days, and 
 compared with Robert Owen's in 1816, 
 " Our best customer, the war, is dead." 
 As a basis of the reconstruction of 
 
 1 Frederick Engels in Soclalhme Utopique et Socia/isme 
 Scientifique, as also the quotations above. 
 
THE UTOPISTS 
 
 215 
 
 Society, Fourier advocated Industrial 
 Co-operation ; but here his Utopianism 
 led him into the trap of formulating 
 dogmatically an elaborate scheme of life 
 in all its details, a scheme which could 
 never be carried out, however good the 
 principles on which it was based might 
 be. His proposal arranges for phalan- 
 steries as the unit of co-operation, in 
 which all life and all industry, agricul- 
 tural and other, should be carried on, 
 and all details are carried out by him 
 most minutely, the number of each 
 halanstery being settled at 1600 souls, 
 most valuable idea was the possi- 
 y and necessity of apportioning due 
 labour to each capacity, and thereby 
 assuring that it should be always pleasur- 
 able, and his dictum that children, who 
 generally like making dirt -pies and 
 getting into a mess, should do the dirty 
 work of the community, may at least be 
 looked on as an illustration of this idea, 
 though laid down as a formal law. 1 His 
 system was not one of pure equality, 
 but admitted distinctions between rich 
 and (comparatively) poor, and advocated 
 a fantastic division of wealth between 
 
2i6 SOCIALISM 
 
 labour, capital, and talent. The aboli- 
 tion of marriage was a point he laid 
 special stress upon. 
 
 In 1 8 12 Fourier's mother died and 
 left him some property, and he retired 
 into the country to write his Treatise on 
 the Association of Domesticity and Agri- 
 culture. Afterwards he came to Paris 
 again, became a clerk in an American 
 firm, and composed in 1830 his New In- 
 dustrial World. It is lamentable to have 
 to relate that in 1831 he wrote attacking 
 both Owen and Saint Simon as charlatans, 
 in spite of the curious points of resem- 
 blance he had to both of them. He 
 died in 1837, but not till he had founded 
 a school, of which Victor Considerant, 
 author of the Destinee Sociale, was the 
 most distinguished member. The Four- 
 ierists started a paper in 1832, which 
 expired in two years, but was revived in 
 1836, and finally suppressed by Govern- 
 ment in 1850. A scheme for realising 
 the phalanstery experimentally was set 
 on foot in 1832 by a deputy of France, 
 but it failed for lack of funds ; so that 
 of the three great Utopists, Owen was 
 the only one who had the fortune, good 
 
THE UTOPISTS 217 
 
 or bad as it may be considered, of seeing 
 his schemes tried by experience. Cabet, 
 indeed, a revolutionist of '48, founded a 
 community in America under the name 
 of Icaria, which was (and is, for it still 
 exists) more nearly an approach to 
 genuine Communism than any of the 
 other communities which have owed 
 their origin to Utopian Socialism. Of 
 these communities there remains a word 
 to be said as a warning to those who are 
 young in the movement. Although as 
 experiments in association something 
 may be learned from them, their con- 
 ditions of life have no claim to the title of 
 Communism, which most unluckily has 
 often been applied to them. Commun- 
 ism can never be realised till the present 
 system of Society has been destroyed by 
 the workers taking hold of the political 
 power. When that happens, it will 
 mean that Communism is on the point 
 of absorbing and transmuting Civilisa- 
 tion all the world over. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE TRANSITION FROM THE 
 UTOPISTS TO MODERN SO- 
 CIALISM 
 
 /^\F the Socialist thinkers who serve as 
 a kind of link between the Utopists 
 and the school of the Socialism of his- 
 torical evolution, or scientific Socialists, 
 by far the most noteworthy figure is 
 Proudhon, who was born at Besancon in 
 1809. By birth he belonged to the 
 working class, his father being a brewer's 
 cooper, and he himself as a youth 
 followed the occupation of cowherding. 
 In 1838, however, he published an 
 essay on general grammar, and in 1839 
 he gained a scholarship to be held for 
 three years, a gift of one Madame Suard 
 to his native town. The result of this 
 
 
 
TRANSITIONAL UTOPISTS 219 
 
 advantage was his most important though 
 far from his most voluminous work, 
 published the same year as the essay 
 which Madame Suard's scholars were 
 bound to write : it bore the title of What 
 is Property ? (Quest-ce que la pro- 
 priety?) his answer being, Property is 
 Robbery {La propriete est le vol). 
 
 As may be imagined, this remarkable 
 essay caused much stir and indignation, 
 and Proudhon was censured by the 
 Besancon Academy for its production, 
 narrowly escaping a prosecution. In 
 1 84 1 he was tried at Besancon for a 
 letter he wrote to Victor Considerant, 
 the Fourierist, but was acquitted. In 
 1846 he wrote his Philosophie de la 
 Misere (Philosophy of Poverty), which 
 received an elaborate reply and refutation 
 from Karl Marx. 
 
 In 1847 ne went to Paris. In the 
 Revolution of 1848 he showed himself 
 a vigorous controversialist, and was 
 elected Deputy for the Seine. He wrote 
 numerous articles in several journals, 
 mostly criticisms of the progress of the 
 revolution. In the Chamber he proposed 
 a tax of one-third to be levied on all 
 
220 SOCIALISM 
 
 interest and rent, which was, as a matter 
 of course, rejected. He also put forward 
 a scheme for a mutual credit bank, by 
 which he hoped to simplify exchange 
 and reduce interest to a vanishing point ; 
 but this scheme was also rejected. 
 
 After the failure of the revolution of 
 '48, Proudhon was imprisoned for three 
 years, during which time he married a 
 young woman of the working class. 
 
 In 1858 he fully developed his system 
 of " Mutualism " in his last work, en- 
 titled Justice in the Revolution and the 
 Church. In consequence of the publica- 
 tion of this book he had to retire to 
 Brussels, but was amnestied in i860, 
 came back to France, and died at Passy 
 in 1865. 
 
 Proudhon's opinions and works may 
 be broadly divided into two periods : In 
 his What is Property ? his position is 
 that of a communist pure and simple ; 
 but after this one clear development of 
 a definite thesis, we meet in his writings, 
 and we must add, in his political actions 
 also, with so much paradox that it is 
 next to impossible to formulate in brief 
 any definite Proudhonian doctrine. At 
 

 TRANSITIONAL UTOPISTS 221 
 
 
 
 one time a communist, at another the 
 vehement opponent of Communism ; at 
 one time professing anarchy, at another 
 lending himself to schemes of the crudest 
 State socialism ; at one time an enthus- 
 iastic theist, at another apparently as 
 strong an atheist ; in one passage of his 
 works giving his eager adhesion to 
 Auguste Comte's worship of women, 
 in another a decided contemner of the 
 female sex, — it is with a sense of con- 
 fusion that one rises from the perusal of 
 his productions. 
 
 His connection with the revolution of 
 '48 seems to have been the turning- 
 point in his history; in his address to 
 the electors of the Seine, in which he 
 put forward the scheme for a credit 
 bank backed by a number of decrees of 
 a State-socialistic nature, and strongly 
 smacking of Bismarck, he announces 
 himself as the man who said Property 
 is Robbery, says that he still maintains 
 that opinion, and then goes on to de- 
 fend the rights of property which he 
 had so successfully annihilated in his 
 first work. 
 
 But as' to his political career, the 
 
222 SOCIALISM 
 
 element he had to work in was an im- 
 possible one for the success of a man 
 holding definite socialistic ideas. On 
 the one hand were the Jacobins with 
 their archaeological restorations of the 
 ideas and politics of 1793 ; on the other 
 Socialism showing itself, taking hold 
 of people's minds, but attempting to 
 realise its doctrines by crude, dislocated, 
 and consequently hopeless schemes of 
 action. Into all these affairs Proudhon 
 looked shrewdly and with insight, and 
 his bitter criticisms of the confusion of 
 the period were shown by the event to 
 have been well founded. 
 
 Proudhon defended the modern family 
 and monogamy in its strictest sense, and 
 does not seem to have troubled himself 
 to study the history of those institutions 
 even superficially : in short, he seems to 
 have been singularly lacking in the his- 
 torical sense, and had not formed any 
 conception of the evolution of society. 
 Those who read his works will find 
 themselves forced to return to his first 
 essay, What is Property ? if they are 
 seeking in him for any consistent series 
 of ideas. He was an eager and rough 
 
TRANSITIONAL UTOPISTS 223 
 
 controversialist, and his style is brilliant 
 and attractive in spite of its discur- 
 siveness. Throughout his life he was 
 thoroughly single-hearted and disin- 
 terested. In spite of his inconsistencies 
 much of his teaching has lived, especi- 
 ally the side of it that thought that 
 economic society must be based on the 
 mutual exchange of services, and the 
 equality of the reward of labour. 
 Proudhon had a great influence on the 
 French proletariat in the latter years of 
 his life and in those immediately follow- 
 ing his death. This influence is now 
 completely gone. In spite of his recur- 
 rence to the crudest ideas of authoritative 
 repression, he is the protagonist of the 
 individualist anarchist school represented 
 to-day by Mr. Benjamin Tucker and 
 by his paper Liberty, published at 
 Boston, U.S.A. 
 
 We may now mention the names of 
 two men of no great importance in 
 themselves, but worth noting as fore- 
 runners of the Sentimental Socialists and 
 Christian Socialists of the present day. 
 Hugues Felicite Robert de Lamennais 
 (born 1782, died 1854) is the type of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
224 SOCIALISM 
 
 the Christian Socialist : he was intended 
 for a priest from the first, and duly took 
 orders. He began by efforts to reform 
 the Catholic Church, so as to make it 
 an effective instrument for happiness 
 and social morality and reform. He 
 expected to be helped and encouraged 
 by the clergy in these efforts, and at 
 first, before they perceived their real 
 tendency, he received some support 
 from them. At last, in his paper 
 UAvenir (the future), he took so 
 decidedly a democratic turn that he 
 incurred the animosity of the whole 
 Church, especially of the then Pope, 
 Gregory XVI. The signal for his com- 
 plete rupture with the Church, however, 
 was the publication (in 1834) of his 
 Paroles d'un Croyant (" Words of a 
 Believer "), which the Pope characterised 
 as " small in size but immense in 
 perversity." After that he became 
 thoroughly democratic or even Com- 
 munistic, as Communism was then 
 understood. A series of political works 
 and pamphlets followed, all in the sense 
 of his new departure. He started, in 
 1848, two papers, one after another, 
 
TRANSITIONAL UTOPISTS 225 
 
 which were suppressed. He sat in the 
 Republican Constituent Chamber until 
 the coup d'etat; and, while Deputy, drew 
 up for the Left a plan of Constitution 
 which was rejected as too revolutionary. 
 He was buried by his own direction 
 without ecclesiastical rites. 
 
 Pierre le Roux (born 1798, died 
 1 871) was originally a disciple of Saint 
 Simon. In 1840 he published his most 
 important work, De VHumanite, whence 
 the name of his school, the Humani- 
 tarians. He joined George Sand and 
 Niardof in a literary review, and it 
 was owing to this connection that the 
 humanitarian tendencies of some of her 
 novels are to be traced. In 1843 he 
 set on foot a co-operative printing 
 association, and started a journal advo- 
 cating co-operation, or as he termed it, 
 " the pacific solution of the problem of 
 the proletariat." He also sat in the 
 Republican Chamber of 1848 : he was 
 exiled in 1851 and lived in Jersey, not 
 returning to France till 1869. He died 
 in Paris under the Commune, and two 
 of its members were deputed to attend 
 his funeral, in the words of the Journal 
 
 Q 
 
 
 
 
 
 
2 2 6 SOCIALISM 
 
 Ojficiely " not in honour of the partisan 
 of the mystical ideas of which we now 
 feel the evil, but of the politician who 
 courageously undertook the defence of 
 the vanquished after the days of June." 
 This is an allusion to the unpractical 
 and non-political tendency of his teach- 
 ing, which undertook to reform society 
 by the inculcation of morality blended 
 with mysticism, the result of which was 
 to be the gradual spread of voluntary 
 industrial co-operation. 
 
 We finish this series with the well- 
 known name of Louis Blanc, a personage 
 more important than the last-named; 
 and more definitely Socialistic in prin- 
 ciples than either he or Lamennais, 
 though his political career finished in 
 a way unworthy of those principles. It 
 should be remembered, however, that he 
 never grasped the great truth that only 
 through the class struggle can the re- 
 generation of society be accomplished. 
 He was born in 1813, of a middle-class 
 family which, on the maternal side, was 
 Corsican, and an incident of the relations 
 between him and his brother Charles 
 is said to have suggested to Dumas 
 
 
TRANSITIONAL UTOPISTS 227 
 
 his famous novelette and play of the 
 Corsican Brothers. 
 
 In 1838 he quarrelled with the pro- 
 prietors of the journal of which he was 
 editor, Le Bonsens, on the subject of 
 the railways then being projected, he 
 maintaining that these ought to be 
 owned and managed by the State, and 
 retired from the editorship in conse- 
 quence. 
 
 In 1840 he published his Organisa- 
 tion of Labour ■, the ideas of which he 
 attempted to realise in the famous 
 "National Workshops," by which he 
 is best known. In this work he put 
 forward the genuine Socialistic maxim 
 of " From each according to his capacity ; 
 to each according to his needs" as the 
 basis of the production of a true society. 
 
 He took an active part in the 
 Revolutionary Government of 1848, 
 and got an edict passed abolishing 
 the punishment of death for political 
 offences. 
 
 In 1848 he got the National Work- 
 shops founded. These failed ; but 
 their failure was not necessarily due to 
 anything wrong in Louis Blanc's con- 
 
228 SOCIALISM 
 
 ception, imperfect as it was : but to 
 the fact that Bethmont, the Minister 
 of Trade and Agriculture, had inten- 
 tionally organised them for failure, inas- 
 much as it was not articles of real and 
 prime necessity, or even those for which 
 there was a genuine demand which were 
 allowed to be produced in them, but 
 merely articles outside the true com- 
 mercial market ; the object being, as 
 in our prisons, not to interfere with the 
 " legitimate " trade and industry of the 
 country. Under such circumstances 
 they naturally caused a heavy drain on 
 the resources of the Republic. Loud 
 demands were made by the middle 
 classes for their suppression, to which 
 the Government at last listened, and 
 their imminent abolition was one of 
 the causes which led to the insurrection 
 of June 1848. 
 
 In consequence of the events of June, 
 Louis Blanc was compelled to flee from 
 France to England, where he wrote his 
 History of the French Revolution. 
 
 He returned to France in 1869, was 
 elected to the legislative body, but 
 played only a subordinate part in the 
 
TRANSITIONAL UTOPISTS 229 
 
 stirring times that followed. It re- 
 mains, indeed, an indelible stain on 
 his character that he deserted the cause 
 of the people in the days of March, 
 1 87 1, leaving Paris to sit amongst the 
 " Liberals " in the reactionary Chamber 
 at Versailles. 
 
 He died in 1882, having outlived his 
 reputation and his influence. 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM— KARL 
 MARX 
 
 ' 1 4 HE foregoing chapters on earlier 
 Socialists may be regarded as lead- 
 ing up to the full development of the 
 complete Socialist theory, or as it is 
 sometimes called, " scientific " Socialism. 
 The great exponent of this theory, and 
 the author of the most thorough criticism 
 of the capitalistic system of production, 
 is the late Dr. Karl Marx. 
 
 He was born in 1 8 1 8 at Treves, his 
 father being a baptized Jew holding an 
 official position in that city. He studied 
 for the law in the University of Bonn, 
 passing his examination with high honours 
 in 1840. In 1843 ne carried Jenny 
 von Westphalen, sister of the well-known 
 Prussian statesman of that name. Phil- 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 231 
 
 osophy and political economy, with 
 especial reference to the great social pro- 
 blems of the age, were his special studies 
 on leaving the university. These studies 
 led him towards Socialism, the result of 
 which was that he felt compelled to 
 decline the offer of an important Govern- 
 ment post. About this time he left 
 Treves for Paris, where he became co- 
 editor with Arnold Ruge of the Deutsch- 
 Franzosische Jahrbucher, and he also 
 edited the Socialist journal Vorwdrts ; 
 but in less than a twelvemonth he was 
 compelled to leave France for Brussels. 
 In March 1848 he was driven from 
 Belgium and fled to Cologne, where the 
 revolutionary ferment was at its height. 
 He at once undertook the editorship of 
 the Rheinische Zeitung, the leading 
 revolutionary journal, which was sup- 
 pressed on the collapse of the revolu- 
 tionary movement in 1849. 
 
 We should mention that in 1847, m 
 conjunction with his life -long friend, 
 Frederic Engels, he put forward the cele- 
 brated " Communist Manifesto," which 
 subsequently served as the basis of the 
 International Association. 
 
232 SOCIALISM 
 
 After 1849 he went to Paris again, 
 where he continued but a short time, and 
 then left France for London, remaining 
 there with brief intermissions till his 
 death, which took place in the spring 
 of 1883. 
 
 The principal part he played in political 
 action during his sojourn in England 
 was the organisation of the International 
 Association. 
 
 The most important among his works, 
 besides Das Kapital, are Die Heilige 
 Familie, written in conjunction with 
 Frederic Engels ; the Mis ere de la 
 Pkzlosophie,ihe answer to Proudhon men- 
 tioned in our last chapter ; 1 8 Brumaire, 
 an anti-Napoleonic pamphlet ; and Zur 
 Kritik der Politischer CEconomie, which 
 laid the foundation for his great work, 
 Das Kapital. 
 
 The importance of this latter work 
 makes it necessary for us to indicate the 
 contents of the principal chapters, so as 
 to form a brief sketch of the Socialist 
 economy. 1 
 
 1 We must remind the reader that we do not profess to 
 offer more than some hints to the student of Marx. Any- 
 thing approaching to an abstract of Das Kapital would take 
 up space far beyond the limits of the present little work. 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 233 
 
 Part I. deals with Commodities and 
 Money. The first chapter defines a 
 commodity. A commodity, according to 
 Marx, is briefly expressed as a socially 
 useful product of labour which stands in 
 relation of exchange to other useful pro- 
 ducts of labour. The value of such a 
 commodity is primarily the amount of 
 necessary social labour contained in it : 
 that is to say, the average amount of 
 labour carried through a certain portion 
 of time necessary to its production in a 
 given state of society. The student 
 must take special note that when Marx 
 uses the word value by itself it is always 
 employed in this sense, that is, to put it 
 in a shorter form, as embodied average 
 human labour. The term use -value 
 explains itself. Exchange-value means 
 the actual relation of one commodity to 
 another or to all others in the market. 
 The ultimate issue of the various ex- 
 pressions of value is the money-form : 
 but in the words of Marx the step to the 
 money-form " consists in this alone, that 
 the character of direct and universal ex- 
 changeability — in other words, that the 
 universal equivalent form — has now by 
 
234 SOCIALISM 
 
 social custom become identified with the 
 substance gold." 
 
 The second chapter deals with ex- 
 lyS change. Exchange, says Marx, presup- 
 poses guardians or owners of commodities, 
 since these cannot go to market of them- 
 selves. An article possesses for the 
 owner no use-value where he seeks to 
 exchange it : if it did, he would not seek 
 to exchange it. " All commodities," says 
 Marx, "are non-use values for their 
 n owners and use-values for their non-owners. 
 Consequently they must all change hands 
 But this change of hands is what con- 
 stitutes their exchange, and the latter 
 puts them in relation with each other 
 as values, and realises them as values. 
 Hence commodities must be realised 
 as values before they can be realised 
 as use-values." 
 
 Commodities, then, find their universal 
 value represented by one commodity 
 from among them, which has in itself 
 no use-value unless it be that of embody- 
 ing and of symbolising the abstract 
 quality of value. 
 
 Chapter III. deals with the circulation 
 of commodities under the money-form. 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 235 
 
 Here Marx very justly observes, "It is 
 because all commodities as values are 
 realised human labour, and therefore 
 commensurable, that their values can be 
 measured by one and the same special 
 commodity, and the latter be converted 
 into the common measure of their values 
 — i.e. into money. Money as a measure 
 of value is the phenomenal form that 
 must of necessity be assumed by that 
 measure of value which is immanent in 
 commodities, labour-time." 
 
 This long and important chapter pro- 
 ceeds to discuss the theory of circulating 
 money or of currency at considerable 
 length and in great detail. 
 
 The problem to be resolved is as 
 follows. The owner of money has to 
 buy his commodities at their value, and 
 to sell them at their value, and neverthe- 
 less at the end of the process to realise a 
 surplus. This is the end and aim of his 
 existence as a capitalist, and if he does » 
 not accomplish it, he is as a capitalist a 
 failure. So that his development from 
 the mere money-owner to the full-blown 
 capitalist has to take place at once within 
 the sphere of circulation and without it : 
 
236 SOCIALISM 
 
 that is, he must follow the law of the 
 exchange of commodities, and neverthe- 
 less must act in apparent contradiction 
 to that law. This problem cannot be 
 solved merely by means of the money 
 which he owns, the value of which is, so 
 to say, petrified. As Ricardo says, " In 
 the form of money, capital has no 
 profit." As money, it can only be 
 hoarded. 
 
 Neither can the surplus originate in 
 the mere re -sale of the commodity, 
 " which does no more than transform 
 the article from its bodily form back into 
 its money-form." The only alternative 
 left is that the change should originate in 
 the use-value of the article bought with 
 the money in the first instance, and on 
 which the capitalist has to operate. 
 
 " In order to be able to extract value 
 from the consumption of a commodity, 
 our friend Moneybags must be so lucky 
 as to find within the sphere of circulation, 
 in the market, a commodity whose use- 
 value possesses the peculiar property of 
 being a source of value, whose actual 
 consumption therefore is itself an em- 
 bodiment of labour, and, consequently, 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 237 
 
 a creation of value. The possessor of 
 money does find on the market such a 
 special commodity in capacity of labour, 
 or labour-power." 
 
 By labour -power or the capacity of 
 labour Marx understands the whole of 
 the mental and physical capacities in a 
 human being which are brought into 
 action in the production of commodities ; 
 in short, the man and all that is in him 
 as a wealth-producing machine. 
 
 Now in order that the possessor of 
 money should find this necessity to the 
 accomplishment of his end and aim — viz. 
 labour - power as a commodity of the 
 market, various conditions are requi- 
 site. 
 
 The man who is to exercise the labour- 
 power for the capitalists' benefit — the 
 labourer — must be "free," that is, his 
 labour must be at his own disposal, and 
 also he must have nothing else to dispose 
 of for his livelihood but his labour- 
 power. On the other hand, any one who 
 has to live by selling commodities other 
 than labour-power must own the means 
 of production, and also the means of 
 subsistence while the commodities are 
 
238 SOCIALISM 
 
 being got ready for the market, and 
 being converted into money. 
 
 As to the value of this article necessary 
 to the life of the capitalist, this labour- 
 power, it is estimated like the value of 
 every other commodity by the average 
 time necessary for its production or re- 
 production ; that is, the average time 
 necessary in a given state of society ; 
 and in plain language this reproduction 
 of labour-power means the maintenance 
 of the labourer. " Given the individual, 
 the production of labour-power consists 
 in the reproduction of himself — or his 
 maintenance." 
 
 Labour -power is realised only in 
 action, that is, when it has become 
 actual labour, and is producing a com- 
 modity ; so that, " the value of labour- 
 power resolves itself into the value of 
 a definite quantity of the means of 
 subsistence. It therefore varies with the 
 value of those means, or with the quantity 
 of labour requisite for their production." 
 
 The minimum limit of the value of 
 labour-power is therefore determined by 
 the value of these means. If the price of 
 labour-power falls below that minimum, 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 239 
 
 it is destroyed : a higgling as to its price 
 has to be gone through between the 
 buyer and the seller, and the price is 
 fixed by contract, though it is not realised 
 until the labour -power is used up or 
 embodied in the article produced by 
 it. From what is stated above, it 
 will be seen that this contract is made 
 between two parties ; on the one hand 
 the workman or producer, who has no 
 means of producing, on the other the 
 possessor of money, who has all the 
 means necessary for the producer to 
 effectively exercise his faculty of pro- 
 duction, and has therefore become a 
 capitalist. " He who was before the 
 money-owner now strides in front as a 
 capitalist ; the possessor of labour-power 
 follows as his labourer. The one with 
 an air of importance, smirking, intent on 
 business: the other timid and holding 
 back, like one who is bringing his own 
 hide to market, and has nothing to 
 expect but — a hiding." 
 
 The labour - process necessary to \ 
 capitalism exhibits two characteristic 
 phenomena : first the labourer works 
 under the control of a capitalist, and 
 
240 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 *} secondly the product of the labourer 
 is the property of a capitalist, and not 
 of the labourer, its immediate producer. 
 
 1 This product appropriated by the capitalist 
 is a use-value, " as for example yarn, or 
 boots ; " says Marx with a grin, " but 
 although boots are in one sense the basis 
 of all social progress, and our capitalist is 
 a decided ' progressist,' the capitalist does 
 not for his special purpose look upon 
 them as boots, or any other use-value. 
 He has primarily two objects in view : 
 
 « first he wants to produce a use-value, 
 not, again, for the sake of its use, but in 
 order that he may exchange it ; and next, 
 
 * in order that his exchange may be fruitful 
 to him, he wants to produce a commodity 
 the value of which shall be greater than 
 the sum of the values used in producing 
 it — that is, the means of production and 
 the labour-power." 
 
 This he is able to accomplish as 
 follows. He buys the use of the labour- 
 power of the workman for a day, while 
 a certain duration of labour in the day 
 is enough to reproduce the workman's 
 expended labour-power — that is, to keep 
 him alive. But the human machine is 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 241 
 
 in all cases capable of labouring for more 
 hours in the day than is necessary for 
 this result, and the contract between the 
 capitalist and the labourer, as understood 
 in the system under which those two 
 classes exist, implies that the exercise of 
 the day's labour-power shall exceed this 
 duration necessary for reproduction, and 
 it is a matter of course that the buyer of 
 the commodity labour-power should do 
 as all buyers of commodities do — con- 
 sume it altogether for his own advantage. 1 
 
 It is by this avocation, the buying of 
 labour -power in the market, and the 
 consumption of all the results of its 
 exercise beyond what is necessary for its 
 reproduction, that the capitalist lives, 
 just as the avocation by which the work- 
 man lives is the actual production of 
 commodities. 
 
 Capitalism cannot be said even to 
 begin before a number of individual 
 owners of money employ simultaneously 
 a number of workmen on the same terms, 
 
 1 Says Mr. Boffin in Dickens's Mutual Friend, when he 
 wants to make a show of striking a somewhat hard, but 
 reasonable bargain : " When I buy a sheep, I buy it out and 
 out, and when I buy a secretary, I expect to buy him out and 
 out," or words to that effect ; and the reasonableness of the 
 conditions are accepted on all hands. 
 
 R 
 
242 SOCIALISM 
 
 that is to say, before the development of 
 a concert of action towards profit among 
 the employers, and a concert of action 
 towards production for the profit of the 
 employers among the employed. 
 
 " A greater number of labourers work- 
 ing together at the same time in one 
 place (or, if you will, in the same field of 
 labour), in order to produce the same 
 sort of commodity under the mastership 
 of one capitalist, constitutes, both historic- 
 ally and logically, the starting-point of 
 capitalist production." 
 
 It differs from the mediaeval system, 
 that of the guilds and their craftsmen, by 
 the greater number of the workmen em- 
 ployed ; but this change to a new form 
 of organisation made at once considerable 
 difference in the rate and manner of pro- 
 duction ; there was less comparative ex- 
 pense of the means of production, such as 
 buildings, tools, warehouses, etc. 1 A con- 
 
 1 The master worker of the guild-system was not really a 
 master at all even after he began to employ journeymen, 
 because their number was limited very closely, and they were 
 all sure to become masters in their turn : the real " employer 
 of labour " was the guild, and the " master " of that period was 
 simply a foreman of the guild j the great change consisted in 
 the breaking down of the position of the guild as employer, 
 and the turning of its foreman into a real owner or capitalist. 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 243 
 
 sequence of this concentration of workmen 
 under one roof was the development of 
 the function of direction in the master as 
 independent of his qualities as a craftsman, 
 and the forcing on the system of this func- 
 tion as a necessary part of production. 
 The master of the guild-craftsman period 
 held his place because he was a better 
 workman and more experienced than his 
 fellows ; he did not differ from them in 
 kind but in degree only ; if he fell sick, for 
 instance, his place would be taken by the 
 next best workman without any disturb- 
 ance in the organisation of the workshop ; 
 but the master of even the earliest period 
 of capitalism was from the beginning un- 
 important as a workman (even when he 
 worked, as he often did at first), but all- 
 important as a director of work. " Simple 
 co-operation," says Marx, " is always the 
 prevailing form, in those branches of pro- 
 duction in which capital acts on a large 
 scale, and division of labour and machinery 
 play but a subordinate part." This sen- 
 tence leads to the next development of 
 capitalism, that of the division of labour, 
 and this brings us to the system of manu- 
 facture, as the word is generally under- 
 
244 SOCIALISM 
 
 stood ; though it has a final development, 
 that of machinery and the factory. This 
 period of the division of labour, more or 
 less pure, extends from the middle of the 
 sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth cen- 
 turies, when it was brought to perfection ; 
 but it must be understood that these sys- 
 tems overlapped one another considerably. 
 
 The division-of-labour or manufactur- 
 ing system starts under two conditions. 
 
 The first is where the employer collects 
 into one workshop workmen of various 
 crafts, the results of whose labours are 
 combined into one article, as, for example, 
 a carriage-maker's, in which wheelwright, 
 coachbuilder, upholsterer, painter, etc., 
 work each at his own occupation, and 
 their products are combined into the 
 one article, a finished carriage. 
 
 The other is the system in which the 
 employer collects his workmen under one 
 roof, and employs the whole of them as 
 one machine in the simultaneous pro- 
 duction of one article which has to go 
 through various processes, these processes 
 being apportioned to various parts of the 
 workman-machine. This system affords 
 a distinct example of evolution by means 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 245 
 
 of survival of the fittest ; sudden increase 
 of production seems to have been called 
 for, and the work accordingly had to be 
 reorganised by being apportioned to dif- 
 ferent workmen in order to save time. 
 Thus this system is the reverse of that 
 illustrated by the carriage-making, in 
 which a number of crafts had to be 
 combined into the manufacture of one 
 article ; whereas in this (pin or needle- 
 making may be taken as an illustra- 
 tion) a number of processes which once 
 formed portions of one craft, now 
 become each of them a separate craft 
 in itself. 
 
 From this follows the complete inter- 
 dependence of each human being forming 
 a part of the workman-machine, no one 
 of whom can produce anything by him- 
 self. The unit of labour is now no 
 longer an individual, but a group. 
 
 But all these processes, however sub- 
 divided, and however combined, were 
 still acts of handicraft ; the same neces- 
 sities which forced the simple co-operation 
 of the first capitalistic period into division 
 of labour, now forced the latter system 
 to yet further development ; though, 
 
246 SOCIALISM 
 
 indeed, other causes besides merely 
 economic ones were at work, such as 
 the growing aggregation of people in 
 towns and the consequent increasing 
 division of labour in Society itself as 
 to the occupations of its members. 
 
 This final development was the sub- 
 stitution of the machine and the com- 
 plete factory-system for the " division- 
 of- labour' and "workshop' systems. 
 Under the new system the group of 
 workmen, every member of which by 
 the performance of a special piece of 
 handicraft turned out some special part 
 of the article made, gave place to a 
 machine which produces the results of 
 all these manoeuvres combined together ; 
 or to an association of machines acting 
 in a group, as the workmen acted. The 
 workman is no longer the principal 
 r factor in the work, the tools that he 
 handled are now worked by a mechanism 
 connected by another mechanism with 
 the power, whatever it may be, that 
 puts the whole in motion. This is the 
 true machine of modern times, as con- 
 trasted with the mere tool-machine of 
 the earlier period, which was an aid to 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 247 
 
 the workman and not a substitute for 
 him. Furthermore, the workshop gives 
 place to the factory, which is not a mere 
 assemblage of machines under one roof, 
 but rather a great machine itself, of 
 which the machines are parts ; as Marx 
 says : " An organised system of machines 
 to which motion is communicated by the 
 transmitting mechanism from a central 
 automaton is the most developed form 
 of production by machinery. Here we 
 have in place of the isolated machine 
 a mechanical monster, whose body fills 
 whole factories, and whose demon power, 
 at first veiled under the slow and measured 
 motion of his giant limbs, at last breaks 
 out into the fast and furious whirl of his 
 countless working organs." 
 
 This is the machine that has produced 
 the great revolution in production of our 
 epoch. The workman once a handicrafts- 
 man, having all control over the article 
 he produced, next became a part of a 
 human machine, and finally has become 
 the servant and tender of a machine ; 
 and by means of all this the fully de- 
 veloped modern capitalist has been 
 brought into existence. 
 
248 SOCIALISM 
 
 We have now come to the point where 
 it is necessary to consider the circulation 
 of commodities ; the first means to this 
 circulation being the establishment of a 
 tertium quid, or universal equivalent. 
 And in order to have a really universal 
 equivalent it is necessary that use-value 
 should be eliminated from it, since such 
 an equivalent is required to express not 
 the diverse qualities of all the various 
 commodities, but the relative quantity 
 of embodied human labour which they 
 severally contain. 
 
 Money as a mere measure of value is 
 imaginary and ideal, but the bodily form 
 of it must express quantitatively equi- 
 valent abstract value — i.e. labour — and 
 takes the form of the precious metals, 
 finally of gold. 
 
 Gold has come to be the bodily form 
 taken by the universal measure of value, 
 partly because of its natural qualities — 
 portability, durability, etc., but chiefly 
 because the course of history has invested 
 it with this function ; and also because 
 its value, instead of changing from, say, 
 week to week, as is the case with other 
 commodities, changes rather from century 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 249 
 
 to century, so that it may be considered 
 stable relatively to them, just as one 
 speaks of indigo as a permanent dye, 
 which it is relatively to other dyes, al- 
 though none are absolutely permanent. 1 
 
 Paper money is promises to pay gold, 
 which is directly exchangeable with all 
 other commodities. Paper money, there- 
 fore, is merely a symbol of the exchange 
 really effected by gold. 
 
 This universal equivalent takes the 
 place of barter, which is the primitive 
 and direct form of exchange, 2 and at 
 which stage the distinction between buyer 
 and seller has not arisen. It now gives 
 
 1 A3 a deduction from this, we may say that while on the 
 one hand there was no abstract necessity for the measure of 
 value taking the form of gold, though there was a necessity 
 for it to take a form embodying a certain definite amount of 
 labour, yet, on the other hand, since it has taken that form, 
 labour notes, or mere promises to pay which are of no value 
 in themselves, cannot, as long as exchange lasts, take the 
 place of gold, which is a commodity having a value in itself, 
 and the particular commodity that has assumed that function 
 through historical selection. 
 
 2 There are transitional stages between barter pure and 
 simple and exchange operated by a universal equivalent, which 
 only partly fulfilled this office : e.g. cattle, in the primitive 
 ancient period, from which the name for money (pecunia) is 
 derived j or ordinary woollen cloth, as in the curious and 
 rather elaborate currency of the Scandinavians before coin was 
 struck in Norway : which currency, by the way, has again, 
 in the form of blankets, been used even in our own times in 
 the Hudson Bay Territory. 
 
250 SOCIALISM 
 
 place to the first form of indirect ex- 
 change, in which a third term is inter- 
 posed between the articles that are to 
 be parted with and acquired. Now for the 
 first time the above distinction takes 
 shape. The seller has a commodity 
 which he does not propose to consume, 
 and therefore he acquires with it money, 
 with which money he buys in turn an- 
 other commodity equal in quantity to 
 that with which he has parted, but 
 different from it in quality. Marx has 
 indicated this transaction by the well- 
 known and useful formula, Commodity, 
 Money, Commodity : C — M — C. 
 
 The habit of hoarding, which is com- 
 mon amongst ancient societies, and also 
 among barbarous peoples, is a natural 
 concomitant of this stage of exchange, 
 and is the first germ of capital. It is 
 brought about by the arrest of the above 
 process at its first phase thus, C — M — 
 the seller of the commodity does not 
 go on to buy. Under these conditions 
 money becomes a social power ; and being 
 a commodity like other commodities, 
 can be acquired by private persons, whom 
 it invests with social power. Therefore in 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 251 
 
 those states of society which had not out- 
 grown their primitive social ethics, money 
 was considered the embodiment of all evil. 
 This stage of exchange marks the pre- 
 commercial use of money ; after a while 
 it tends to develop into another stage, 
 which carries the exchange a step further. 
 The holder of a commodity which he 
 does not propose to consume exchanges 
 it for money, which he again exchanges 
 for a commodity to be used, not for his 
 personal consumption, but to be ex- 
 changed once more for money. He 
 would have no object in doing this if his 
 aim were merely that of the simple ex- 
 changer (C. M. C), namely, to obtain 
 an article of consumption different in 
 kind from that which he has exchanged, 
 since in money there is no inherent differ- 
 ence of quality, and therefore whatever 
 difference there may be must be one of 
 quantity. Accordingly the object of the 
 exchanger in this second stage is amount, 
 not kind. In going through his process 
 of exchange (the formula for which may 
 be stated thus — 
 
 C~- M - C - M - C), 
 the second quantum of money must be 
 
252 SOCIALISM 
 
 more than the first, or else he will have 
 failed in his object ; will have made a 
 bad bargain, as the phrase goes. On 
 the other hand, though this form of ex- 
 change differs essentially it nevertheless 
 connects itself with the earlier form, in 
 which money occurs only as the middle 
 term between commodity and commodity, 
 thus distinguishing it from simple barter, 
 because even in the later form the result 
 of the merchant's transaction is a com- 
 modity with which he intends to begin a 
 fresh transaction — 
 
 6- M - C - M - C. 
 
 This is the form of exchange which 
 was the practice of the developed classical 
 world in its commercial operations. The 
 break up of the Roman Empire, and the 
 confusion that followed, dislocated this 
 commerce, and largely brought exchange 
 back again to its earlier and simple form 
 of the exchange of a commodity for 
 money with which to buy another com- 
 modity to be consumed, which was for 
 the most part the character of the ex- 
 change of the Middle Ages. 
 
 The second form of exchange leads 
 without a break into the third or modern 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 253 
 
 form of Capitalistic Exchange, in which 
 the exchanger, beginning with money, 
 buys a commodity in order to exchange 
 it for money ; which money, as in the 
 foregoing stage, must be more in quan- 
 tity than that with which he began, or 
 his transaction will be a failure. This 
 process differs from that of the last- 
 mentioned stage of exchange in that the 
 result of the transaction is always money, 
 and not a true commodity (that is, a use- 
 value), the latter in the long-run appear- 
 ing only nominally in the transaction. 
 
 To make this clearer, we may give 
 concrete examples of the three forms of 
 exchange. 
 
 In the first stage, illustrated by the 
 proceedings of the craftsman of the time 
 of Homer, which were pretty much those 
 of the mediaeval craftsman also, the 
 village potter sold his pots, and with the 
 money he got for them, which, possible 
 trickery apart, represented just the value 
 or embodied labour of the pots, he 
 bought meal, oil, wine, flesh, etc., for his 
 own livelihood, and consumed them. 
 
 The merchant of the later classical 
 period shipped, say, purple cloth from 
 
254 SOCIALISM 
 
 Sidon to Alexandria, sold his cloth there, 
 and with the money bought gum- Arabic 
 (from the Soudan) and frankincense (from 
 Arabia), which he sold at Athens, where 
 again he shipped oil for another market. 
 He always handled the actual goods he 
 professed to trade in, and the wares which 
 he thus exchanged against the universal 
 equivalent, money, were of various kinds. 
 Similar commerce went on in the Middle 
 Ages, as with the merchants of Amalfi, 
 Venice, etc., side by side with the primitive 
 barter of the feudal manor, and of the mar- 
 ket-town with its corporation and guilds. 
 
 The modern man of commerce, on 
 the contrary, necessarily begins his trans- 
 action with money. He buys, say, 
 indigo, which he never sees, receives for 
 it more money than he gave for it, and 
 goes on steadily in this process, dealing 
 (unlike the ancient carrier -merchant) 
 with one class of goods only ; and all the 
 goods in which he deals represent to him 
 so much money : they are only present 
 in his transactions nominally. Money 
 is the be-all and end-all of his existence 
 as a commercial man. 
 
 This is an example of the pure form 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 255 
 
 of capitalistic exchange, wherein money 
 is exchanged for commodities, and these 
 again for money plus an increment ; the 
 formula for which, as given by Marx, is 
 M-C-M. 
 
 The next question we have to con- 
 sider is how the surplus, the increment 
 above-mentioned, obtained by this pro- 
 cess of exchange, is realised, — or, in plain 
 language, where it comes from. 
 
 Marx now shows " how the trick is 
 done," that is, the process by which the 
 capitalist exploits the labourer under the 
 present system of wages and capital. 
 
 We now come to the two instruments 
 which the capitalist uses in his exploita- 
 tion of labour, and which are named 
 constant and variable capital ; constant 
 capital being the raw material and instru- 
 ments of production, and variable capital 
 the labour-power to be employed in pro- 
 ducing on and by means of the former. 
 
 The labourer, as we have seen, adds a 
 value to the raw material upon which he 
 works ; but by the very act of adding a 
 new value he preserves the old ; in one 
 character he adds new value, in another 
 he merely preserves what already existed. 
 
256 SOCIALISM 
 
 He effects this by working in a particular 
 way, e.g. by spinning, weaving, or forg- 
 ing, that is, he transforms things which 
 are already utilities into new utilities pro- 
 portionately greater than they were before. 
 
 " It is thus," says Marx, " that the 
 cotton and spindle, the yarn and the 
 loom, the iron and the anvil become 
 constituent elements of a new use-value." 
 That is, in order to acquire this new 
 value, the labour must be directed to a 
 socially useful end, to a general end, that 
 is, to which the general labour of society 
 is directed, and the value added is to be 
 measured by the average amount of labour - 
 power expended ; i.e. by the duration of 
 the average time of labour. 
 
 Marx says : " We have seen that the 
 means of production transfer value to 
 the new product so far only as during 
 the labour-process they lose value in the 
 shape of their old use-value. The 
 maximum loss of value that they can 
 suffer in the process is plainly limited by 
 the amount of the original value with 
 which they came into the process, or in 
 other words by the labour-time necessary 
 for their production. Therefore, the 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 257 
 
 means of production can never add more 
 value to the product than they themselves 
 possess independently of the process in 
 which they assist. However useful a 
 given kind of raw material, or a machine, 
 or other means of production may be, 
 though it may cost £150, or say 500 
 days' labour, yet it cannot under any 
 circumstances add to the value of the 
 product more than £150. Its value is 
 determined not by the labour - process 
 into which it enters as a means of pro- 
 duction, but by that out of which it has 
 issued as a product. In the labour- 
 process it only serves as a mere use- 
 value, a thing with useful properties, 
 and could not therefore transfer any 
 value to the product unless it possessed 
 such value previously." The matter is 
 succinctly put as follows : " The means 
 of production on the one hand, labour- 
 power on the other, are merely the 
 different modes of existence which the 
 value of the original capital assumed 
 when from being money it was trans- 
 formed into the various factors of the 
 labour - process. That part of capital 
 that is represented by the means of 
 
 s 
 
258 SOCIALISM 
 
 production, by the raw material, auxiliary 
 material, and the instruments of labour, 
 does not in the process of production 
 undergo any quantitative alteration of 
 value. I therefore call it the constant 
 part of capital, or more shortly constant 
 capital." 
 
 At first sight it might be thought that 
 the wear and tear of the machinery, and 
 the seeming disappearance of part of the 
 auxiliary material (as e.g. the mordants 
 used in dyeing cloth or yarn, or the 
 gums, etc., used in textile printing) con- 
 tradict this statement as to the alteration 
 of value ; but on closer view it will be 
 seen that the above wear and tear and 
 apparent consumption enter into the new 
 product just as much as the visible raw 
 material does ; neither are really con- 
 sumed, but transformed. 
 
 In the following chapters Marx enters 
 into an elaborate and exhaustive analysis 
 of the rate of surplus-value, i.e. of the 
 rate at which the creation of surplus- 
 value takes place ; and he also deals 
 with the important subject of the dura- 
 tion of the working-day. But as this is 
 after all a matter of detail, in spite of its 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 259 
 
 very great interest and importance we 
 must omit it, as it would carry us 
 beyond the scope of this chapter. 
 
 Marx distinguishes between absolute 
 and relative " surplus - value " ; the 
 absolute being the product of a day's 
 labour over and above the necessary 
 subsistence of the workman, whatever 
 the time necessary for the production of 
 a definite amount of product may be. 
 The relative ' f surplus-value," on the 
 other hand, is determined by the in- 
 creased productivity of labour caused by 
 new inventions, machinery, increased 
 skill, either in manipulation or the 
 organisation of labour, by which the 
 time necessary for the production of the 
 labourer's means of subsistence may be 
 indefinitely shortened. 
 
 It will be seen once again from all this, 
 that whatever instruments may be put 
 into the hands of the labourer to bring 
 about a result from his labour, in spite 
 of all pretences to the contrary, the one 
 instrument necessary to the capitalist is 
 the labourer himself living under such 
 conditions that he can be used as a mere 
 instrument for the production of profit. 
 
260 SOCIALISM 
 
 The tools, machinery, factories, means of 
 exchange, etc., are only intermediate aids 
 for putting the living machine into 
 operation. 
 
 Marx now goes on to trace the de- 
 velopment of the capitalist in the present 
 epoch, indicating the latest phase of the 
 class-struggle ; he points out the strife 
 of the workman with the machine, the 
 intensification of labour due to the con- 
 stant improvement of machinery, etc. 
 He then gives what may be called a 
 history and analysis of the Factory Acts, 
 the legislation to which the employing 
 class found themselves compelled, in 
 order to make it possible for the 
 " free " workman to live under his new 
 conditions of competition ; in order, in 
 short, to keep the industrial society 
 founded by the machine-revolution from 
 falling to pieces almost as soon as it 
 was established. 
 
 The point of the intensification of 
 labour is so important that it demands 
 a word or two in passing ; the gist of 
 the matter as put forward by Marx 
 resolves itself into this : As the organ- 
 isation of production progresses towards 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 261 
 
 perfection, the wear and tear of the 
 workman in a given space of labour- 
 time is increased ; and this is true of 
 the organisation of the " division-of- 
 labour " period, only it is limited by the 
 fact that the man himself is the machine, 
 and no such limitation exists in the 
 period of fully-developed machinery, in 
 which the workman is an adjunct of 
 the machine, which latter dictates to 
 its supplement, the workman, in its 
 constant craving for increasing product- 
 ivity, the amount of wear and tear of 
 his body in each hour's work. This 
 emphasizes as plainly as possible the 
 subjection of the man to the machine. 
 
 Marx also deals with the theory of 
 compensation to the workman displaced 
 by machinery ; that is, the common view, 
 that by the labour-saving of machinery, 
 which at first sight would seem to tend 
 to the lessening of the number of men 
 employed, more capital is set free for 
 employment. But, says Marx : " Sup- 
 pose a capitalist to employ 100 workmen 
 at £30 a-year each in a carpet factory. 
 The variable capital annually laid out 
 amounts therefore to ^3000. Suppose 
 
262 SOCIALISM 
 
 also that he discharges fifty of his work- 
 men, and employs the remaining fifty 
 with machinery that costs him £1500. 
 To simplify matters we take no account 
 of buildings, coal, etc. Further, suppose 
 that the raw material annually consumed 
 costs ^3000 both before and after the 
 change. Is any capital set free by this 
 metamorphosis? Before the change the 
 total sum of ^6000 consisted half of 
 constant, half of variable, capital. The 
 variable capital, instead of being one- 
 half is only one -quarter of the total 
 capital. Instead of being set free, a part 
 of the capital is here locked up in such a 
 way as to cease to be employed in labour- 
 power ; variable has been changed into 
 constant capital. Other things remaining 
 unchanged, the capital of £6000 can in 
 future employ no more than fifty men. 
 With each improvement in machinery, it 
 will employ fewer." 
 
 And again : " The labourers when 
 driven out of the workshop by machin- 
 ery, are thrown upon the labour-market, 
 and there add to the number of workmen 
 at the disposal of the capitalists. In 
 Part VII. of this book it will be seen 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 263 
 
 that this effect of machinery, which, as 
 we have seen, is represented to be a 
 compensation to the working class, is 
 on the contrary a most frightful scourge. 
 For the present, I will only say this: 
 The labourers that are thrown out of 
 work in any branch of industry, can 
 no doubt seek for employment in some 
 other branch. If they find it, and thus 
 renew the bond between them and the 
 means of subsistence, this takes place 
 only by the intermediary of a new and 
 additional capital that is seeking invest- 
 ment ; not at all by the intermediary 
 of the capital that formerly employed 
 them, and was afterwards converted into 
 machinery." The remainder of this 
 Part V. of Marx deals with various 
 questions connected with the Great In- 
 dustry, and the changes produced by it 
 on Society. Part VI. deals with the 
 transformation of the value or price of 
 labour -power into wages ; with time 
 wages, piece wages, and the national 
 differences of wages. Part VII. deals 
 with the important subject of the ac- 
 cumulation of capital ; first, with its 
 simple reproduction, afterwards with the 
 
264 SOCIALISM 
 
 conversion of surplus-value itself back 
 into capital, and with the transition of 
 the laws of property, that characterise 
 the production of commodities, into the 
 laws of capitalistic appropriation. This 
 part also contains a sarcastic refutation 
 of the now exploded stupidity (scarcely 
 to be called a theory) of " abstinence " 
 as the source of interest ; it also deals 
 with the old wages -fund theory and 
 other fallacies of bourgeois economy, 
 concluding with a long and elaborate 
 chapter on the general law of capital- 
 istic accumulation in its various aspects. 
 The last Part (XIII.) treats of the so- 
 called primitive accumulation, of which 
 Marx says : " This primitive accumula- 
 tion plays in political economy about 
 the same part as original sin in theology. 
 Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin 
 fell upon the human race. Its origin is 
 supposed to be explained when it is told 
 as an anecdote of the past. In times 
 long gone by there were two sorts of 
 people, one, the diligent, intelligent, and, 
 above all, frugal elite ; the other, lazy 
 rascals, spending their substance and more 
 in riotous living. The legend of theo- 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 265 
 
 logical original sin tells us certainly how 
 man is to be condemned to eat his bread 
 in the sweat of his brow ; but the history 
 of economic original sin reveals to us that 
 there are people to whom this is by no 
 means essential. Never mind! Thus 
 it came to pass that the former sort ac- 
 cumulated wealth, and the latter sort had 
 at last nothing to sell except their own 
 skins. And from this original sin dates 
 the poverty of the great majority, that, 
 despite all its labour, has up to now 
 nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth 
 of the few that increases constantly 
 although they have long ceased to work. 
 ... In actual history it is notorious 
 that conquest, enslavement, robbery, 
 murder, briefly force, play the great 
 part. In the tender annals of Political 
 Economy, the idyllic reigns from time 
 immemorial. Right and 'labour' were 
 from all time the sole means of enrich- 
 ment, the present year of course always 
 excepted. As a matter of fact, the 
 methods of primitive accumulation are 
 anything but idyllic." 
 
 Marx then proceeds to give an in- 
 stance of one important form of " Primi- 
 
266 SOCIALISM 
 
 tive Accumulation," the expropriation of 
 the peasants from the land, taking affairs 
 in England as a type of this idyllic pro- 
 ceeding; as also the legislation at the 
 close of the Middle Ages against vagrants, 
 I etc., that is, against those who had been 
 expropriated ; and the enactments for 
 v ' the forcing down of wages. He then 
 describes the birth of the capitalist farmer 
 of modern times, and the reaction of the 
 agricultural revolution on the town in- 
 dustry ; the creation of the home-market 
 for industrial capital, etc. A chapter 
 follows on the historical tendency of 
 capitalistic accumulation to work out its 
 own contradiction ; it becomes necessary 
 again to quote a passage as it bears refer- 
 ence to the future of Society : " The 
 capitalist mode of appropriation, the 
 result of the capitalist mode of produc- 
 tion, produces capitalist private property. 
 This is the first negation of individual 
 private property, 1 as founded on the 
 labour of the proprietor. But capitalistic 
 
 1 It is important not to misunderstand this phrase as used 
 here. The labour of the Middle Ages, though individual 
 from its mechanical side, was from its moral side quite 
 definitely dominated by the principle of association ; as we 
 have seen, the " master " of that period was but a delegate of 
 the guild. 
 
 1 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 267 
 
 production begets with the inexorability 
 of a law of Nature its own negation. It 
 is the negation of negation. This does 
 not re-establish private property for the 
 producer, but gives him property based 
 on the acquisitions of the capitalistic era ; 
 i.e. on co-operation, and the possession 
 in common of the land and of the means 
 of production. The transformation of 
 scattered private property, arising from 
 individual labour, into capitalistic private 
 property, is naturally a process incom- 
 parably more protracted, violent, and 
 difficult than the transformation of capi- 
 talistic private property, already practi- 
 cally resting on socialised production, 
 into socialised property. In the former 
 case we had the expropriation of the mass 
 of the people by a few usurpers ; in the 
 latter we have the expropriation of a few 
 usurpers by the mass of the people." 
 
 A chapter on certain middle-class 
 economist notions respecting colonisation 
 ends the first volume of Marx's epoch- 
 making work, a volume expounding the 
 salient principles of the new economy. 1 
 
 1 A second volume was published the year after Marx's 
 death, and Frederic Engels is now at work preparing the 
 third and final volume for publication. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 SOCIALISM MILITANT 
 
 AX^E have now come to the point at 
 which we must leave our account 
 of what has taken place in the develop- 
 ment of society, and must give our views 
 as to how the inevitable transformation 
 of Civilisation into Socialism is most 
 likely to happen; what is going on at 
 present that tends towards this ; and 
 what the tactics of those should be 
 who desire the change and are working 
 for it. 
 
 We are driven to consider these 
 matters from the point of view of our 
 own British population, as it is through 
 these that the British socialist must 
 work directly, although with the assured 
 hope that in so doing he is furthering the 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 269 
 
 cause of social transformation through- 
 out all modern civilisation. 
 
 As above hinted, things have much 
 changed since scientific Socialism has been 
 definitely promulgated in this country. 
 
 Ten years ago, from the time at 
 which we are writing, the British work- 
 ing classes knew nothing of Socialism, 
 and, except for a few who had been 
 directly influenced by the continental 
 movement, were, on the surface and by 
 habit, hostile to it. A Socialist lecturer 
 in those days almost invariably found 
 himself in opposition, not only to the 
 members of the middle classes who might 
 be present, but also to the working men 
 amongst his audience ; who, not being 
 able even to conceive of the ideas which 
 he was putting forward, at the best took 
 refuge in the Radicalism to which they 
 were accustomed. 
 
 In short the working man of our 
 generation, even when an advanced 
 politician, looked on himself as a free 
 citizen like any other man, and had 
 no consciousness of his position as a 
 proletarian, or that the reason for his 
 existence, as a workman, was that he 
 
270 SOCIALISM 
 
 might produce profit by his labour for 
 his master. His ideal (again as a work- 
 man) was good wages and constant 
 employment ; that is, enough to enable 
 him to live without much trouble in a 
 constant condition of inferiority. His 
 ideal of prosperity as an individual 
 was becoming a master and extracting 
 profits from his old associates, like the 
 French soldier, who is conventionally 
 supposed to carry the Marshal's baton 
 in his knapsack. This is now so much 
 changed that the mass of the working 
 classes is beginning to feel its position 
 of economical slavery ; there is no longer 
 amongst it any hostility to Socialism ; 
 and those working men who take 
 genuine interest in general politics are 
 in favour of Socialist tendencies as far 
 as they understand them ; so that 
 nowadays the Socialist lecturer rather 
 finds a difficulty in drawing out opposi- 
 tion to his views, until he begins to deal 
 with details. 
 
 On the other hand, though the work- 
 ing class is awakening to a consciousness 
 of its condition, it is sluggish in political 
 activity. But this is, no doubt, a passing 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 271 
 
 phase with the workmen, easily accounted 
 for by their absorption in the immediate 
 industrial struggle ; and on this side also, 
 progress is certainly being made. The 
 old battle between the workmen and 
 the manufacturers is still, necessarily, 
 going on ; but is changing its character. 
 There is in it less of the mere dispute 
 between two parties to a contract 
 admitted as necessary by either, and 
 more of an instinct of essentially 
 opposed interests between employers 
 and employed, and even of revolt ; the 
 working men are beginning to assume 
 that they have a right to some share in 
 the control of manufacture ; the masters 
 for their part perceive this new spirit, 
 and have begun a definite attack on the 
 organisations which are instinct with it. 
 
 One occasion has arisen which has 
 appealed strongly to the instincts of the 
 working classes generally, and has united 
 them in a socio-political demand, to wit 
 the eight hours legal day ; whatever may 
 be said as to the effect that an enactment 
 in this sense would have, the demand at 
 any rate expresses the desire of the 
 workmen to manage their own affairs, 
 
272 SOCIALISM 
 
 and to curtail the power of the capitalist 
 class. 
 
 Moreover, it is a demand which can 
 only be sustained with the collaboration 
 of the workmen of Europe at least, if 
 not of all civilisation, so that it has the 
 further advantage of bringing the British 
 proletarian into friendly contact with his 
 continental brother for the furtherance 
 of a tangible and immediate common 
 gain. 
 
 A necessary accompaniment of the 
 wages and capital system, with its 
 competition for employment amongst 
 the propertiless proletariat, is the float- 
 ing mass of workmen rejected for the 
 time by the labour-market ; this mass of 
 unemployed has a continuous tendency 
 to increase as machinery and the 
 organisation of the factory grow to- 
 ward perfection, the complement to 
 this phenomenon being the cycles of 
 inflation and depression, which are also 
 a necessary consequence of the great 
 machine industry, and the world- 
 market which it feeds. At every 
 fresh depression this matter of the 
 unemployed becomes more pressing and 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 273 
 
 harder to be dealt with, and although the 
 regular recurrence of these crises was 
 denied for a long time, it has now 
 been generally admitted. The periods 
 of depression, which were at first short 
 and sharp, and separated by long times 
 of prosperity, have grown to be of 
 longer duration if comparatively not so 
 severe. As a consequence, the lack of 
 employment over large sections of the 
 population is becoming chronic. It is 
 thought by some of those who further the 
 legal eight hours' day that this measure 
 would do much towards absorbing the 
 mass of the unemployed ; but though its 
 immediate effect might be felt in this 
 direction, yet when the labour-market 
 steadied after the change, it would be 
 found that the evil was little lessened. 
 The chronic lack of employment will 
 have to be dealt with by more direct 
 methods, which will more definitely 
 attack the Freedom of Contract (so- 
 called), of which more hereafter. 
 
 It has been said that the condition of 
 the working classes has much improved 
 within this century ; this is true in an 
 absolute sense of the skilled artisans ; 
 
274 SOCIALISM 
 
 though the improvement has not touched 
 the fringe of labour at all. Even as 
 to skilled workmen, relatively to the 
 enormous increase of wealth in the 
 country ', they are in a worse and not in 
 a better condition ; this combined with 
 the fact that their political power has 
 grown, makes it certain that they will 
 claim an ever -increasing share in the 
 wealth that they produce ; and such 
 betterment they can obviously only 
 obtain at the expense of the capitalist 
 class. The improvement therefore on 
 these terms of a part of the workmen 
 by no means indicates stability in the 
 present fabric of society. For the 
 prosperity of the middle classes gives 
 a standard of comfort to the workmen ; 
 and on the other hand it is growing 
 clearer to them that the obstacles to 
 attaining a like welfare are artificially 
 economical, and not essential, and can 
 be done away with by means of 
 combined action in industrial and 
 political directions. 
 
 Meantime, though the middle class 
 has increased enormously in numbers, 
 and become very much richer as a class, 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 275 
 
 • 
 
 yet it has its own unprosperous fringe, 
 which has grown beyond measure, mostly 
 because of the great diffusion and 
 consequent loss in market - value of 
 education. This intellectual proletariat, 
 as it has been called, is one of the most 
 disruptive elements of modern society, 
 as it is largely in sympathy with the 
 wage-earners, and is quick to catch up 
 with new ideas, while the position of 
 most of its members is worse than that 
 of an average skilled workman. It 
 must be said by the way that in Germany 
 this element of the poor but educated 
 section of the middle classes is even more 
 important than here. 
 
 We have then a large body of 
 proletarian producers, with important 
 allies among the middle classes them- 
 selves, who are in an inferior economic 
 position to those whose sole business is 
 making a profit out of them, who do not 
 produce at all. But this better-off work- 
 ing class is above the condition of abject 
 poverty, and its intelligence and educa- 
 tion is as a body little, if at all, inferior to 
 that of the class that keeps it in sub- 
 jection. Added to that, it has, as above 
 
276 SOCIALISM 
 
 said, now obtained considerable political 
 power, which is shared to a great extent 
 by the unskilled workmen, with whom 
 they now make common cause. 
 
 It seems certain therefore that the 
 workmen, with their eyes fixed on the 
 necessity for their bettering themselves 
 as a class, and the growing consciousness 
 that this can only be done by limiting 
 the power and consequent riches of their 
 masters, will press forward their case 
 politically ; that is, by forcing legislation 
 in their favour from the present possess- 
 ing classes ; which will in the long run 
 come to this, that they will deprive those 
 classes of all the privilege that makes 
 them a master-class. 
 
 It seems to us that it is along this line, 
 which the workmen are now beginning 
 to take up of themselves, that progress 
 towards revolution will be made. For it 
 must be remembered once more that the 
 great mass of those who are pushing 
 forward by this road, are only very 
 partially conscious of whither it is tend- 
 ing ; seeing, not the birth of' a new 
 society founded on general equality of 
 condition, but rather a higher and less 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 277 
 
 precarious standard of livelihood and 
 something more of social recognition 
 from their superiors ; in short, it is the 
 ideal, not of Socialists, but of men moved 
 by the growing instinct towards Socialism. 
 It must here be noted as to this common- 
 place and unideal side of the movement, 
 that, throughout modern history, there 
 has been in all democratic fermentations 
 a discrepancy, indeed often an instinctive 
 antipathy, between the theoretic move- 
 ment, as conceived of by thinkers, and 
 the actual popular or working-class 
 struggle. The latter intent on immediate 
 advantages, and unconscious of any ideal ; 
 the former full of the ideal which they 
 have grasped intuitively from the first, 
 but finding the necessary steps towards 
 it so repulsive to them, that they are 
 incapable of taking action. Sir Thomas 
 More, for example, who imagined a 
 society free from the evils of privileged 
 commercialism, which was first raising its 
 head in his time, had no sympathy with 
 the western rebels in England or with the 
 Peasant War in Germany. The French 
 Utopists condemned popular revolu- 
 tionary action. Robert Owen, though 
 
278 SOCIALISM 
 
 the most humane of men, looked upon 
 Chartism as an interruption to his co- 
 operative schemes, and deprecated it. 
 
 The progress of the revolutionary idea 
 is shown by the fact that, in our own 
 times, there is nothing but a trace of this 
 jarring left. The workmen are not un- 
 willing to accept the theorists as leaders ; 
 while the theorists fully and frankly 
 recognise that it is through the instinc- 
 tive working-class movement towards 
 the bettering of life, by whatever political- 
 economical methods, that their ideal of a 
 new society must be sought. This period 
 of practical unity of aim between the 
 theorist and the agitator for immediate 
 gains, must be considered to date from 
 the Communist Manifesto published by 
 Marx and Engels in 1847. 
 
 In short, while it is essential that the 
 ideal of the new society should be always 
 kept before the eyes of the mass of the 
 working -classes, lest the continuity of 
 the demands of the people should be 
 broken, or lest they should be mis- 
 directed ; so it is no less essential that 
 the theorists should steadily take part in 
 all action that tends towards Socialism, 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 
 
 79 
 
 lest their wholesome and truthful theories 
 should be left adrift on the barren shore 
 of Utopianism. 
 
 The demands for legislation at present 
 formulated by the working-classes gener- 
 ally, and adopted, so far as they go, by 
 Socialists, are manifestly incomplete, and 
 if granted would still leave us with the 
 evils of the capitalist system little touched. 
 For example, the legal eight hours' day, 
 if carried, would, as above pointed 
 out, result in a quite temporary absorp- 
 tion of the unemployed, and also it would 
 not of itself permanently increase the 
 wages of the employed. In order that 
 the condition of the unskilled workmen 
 should be raised to something like a 
 human level, it would be necessary in our 
 opinion that, first of all, a minimum legal 
 wage should be enacted ; and this also 
 would be illusive if it were not supple- 
 mented by the enactment of a legal 
 maximum for all the necessaries of life ; 
 since, otherwise, prices would rise in 
 some sort of proportion to the higher 
 wages enforced by the new legislation. 
 But it must not be supposed that any 
 such measures would be of permanent 
 
28o SOCIALISM 
 
 value except as preludes to the assump- 
 tion by the community of all the means 
 of production and exchange, to wit, 
 the land, the mines, the railways, the 
 factories, etc., and the credit establish- 
 ments of the country. It is a matter of 
 course that we do not expect to see this 
 done by catastrophe, — that some Monday 
 morning the sun will rise on a communised 
 state which was capitalistic on Saturday 
 night. 1 
 
 Various schemes for accomplishing this 
 transfer gradually have been suggested. 
 These must be tested by experience ; 
 suffice it here to say that the pith of 
 them is to work by municipalities and 
 trade organisations for the decentralisa- 
 tion of administration, and the acquire- 
 ment of control over the industries of 
 the country. It is an encouraging sign of 
 the times that even now, both in Paris 
 and London, there seems to be a tendency 
 for the municipal bodies to supplement, 
 and even to supersede the functions of 
 
 1 On the ridiculous assumption that this is intended rests 
 many a "crushing" indictment of Socialism, e.g. it consti- 
 tutes the marrow of Herr Eugene Richter's Socialdemocratische 
 Zukunfts-bilder [London 1893] (Pictures of the Socialistic 
 Future). 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 281 
 
 the national legislatures. The Bill 
 prepared by the present Government 
 (clearly with the intention of pleasing the 
 country electors) for the formation of 
 District and Parish Councils, though their 
 powers will be but small, is neverthe- 
 less an important step, if only as provid- 
 ing a democratic machinery, which can 
 be hereafter used for socialistic purposes. 
 
 It should here be stated that there are 
 current amongst Socialists two views on 
 the method of dealing with the modern 
 bureaucratic state, not involving any ulti- 
 mate opposition to each other, but the 
 result of looking on the matter from 
 different points of view. To some the 
 national-political systems seem so difficult 
 of attack, and to serve so clearly the end 
 of keeping some kind of society together 
 during the transition period, that they 
 look forward to the new society develop- 
 ing itself under the political shell of the 
 old bureaucratic states, which could to a 
 certain extent be used by the revolu- 
 tionists, rather than to any disruption of 
 them prior to the realisation of the new 
 social system. 
 
 Others again agree with us in the 
 
282 SOCIALISM 
 
 above stated views, that while the national 
 systems cannot at present be directly 
 attacked with success as to their more 
 fundamental elements, yet that these can, 
 and should be, starved out by the con- 
 tinuous action of two principles, one 
 federal and international, the other local. 
 That is to say, there should take place a 
 gradual and increasing delegation of the 
 present powers of the central govern- 
 ment to municipal and local bodies, until 
 the political nation should be sapped, 
 and give place to the federation of local 
 and industrial organisations. We con- 
 sider that this is essential in view of the 
 fact that these latter would have much 
 greater capacity for dealing with the 
 details of the change. And indeed much 
 of their work could go on during the 
 period in which the old political nations 
 were weakening into dissolution, or, as 
 may be better said, were becoming rudi- 
 mentary. For example, in the steps to- 
 wards communisation of industries which 
 would result from the law of minimum 
 and maximum, the regulations would 
 necessarily have to be in the hands of 
 these local bodies (County and District 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 283 
 
 Councils, etc.) It is becoming clear to 
 every one that it is absurd for the central 
 legislation to have to do with the details 
 of life in places of which it knows little 
 or nothing. Instances of such cases will 
 keep on multiplying, until it will be 
 found that the centre has nothing to do 
 herein, and the interest in it will be then 
 transferred to the localities. A similar 
 line of argument applies to the trades. 
 Even now there is at least a foreshadow- 
 ing of practical unanimity of the miners, 
 masons, cotton operatives, and others 
 of this country, agreeing first of all 
 amongst themselves, and then with the 
 same trades in France, Germany, etc. 
 This is, there is little doubt, the be- 
 ginning of the Industrial Federation, 
 to which we shall revert in the next 
 chapter. 
 
 But the central state being supplanted 
 by local bodies in local administration 
 and by the industrial bodies independent 
 of locality, there would remain the third 
 function which it exercises at present, to 
 wit the regulation of international affairs ; 
 and it is clear that in modern times the 
 question of peace and war is almost 
 
284 SOCIALISM 
 
 altogether wielded by capitalistic exi- 
 gencies, so that this function also would 
 fail the political nation when capitalism 
 fell. There would be nothing left for it 
 to do ; it would simply die out. Indeed 
 we may be sure that the growing under- 
 standing on industrial questions is already 
 tending, by destroying national jealousies, 
 to the making an end of the destructive 
 part of the functions of central govern- 
 ments. Hence, even before the political 
 nation falls into its last stages of decay, 
 we may hope to see a central arbitrat- 
 ing body depriving it of the business 
 which in the past has seemed especially 
 essential to it. 
 
 This is already gone so far that an 
 important proposal is on foot as a plank 
 in the socialist programme : namely, the 
 suggestion of the formation of an inter- 
 national board of arbitration, immediately 
 for the purpose of avoiding war by the 
 adjudication of disputes. This might 
 easily be made to develop into an inter- 
 national Parliament. The substitution 
 of arbitration for war would not indeed 
 of itself bring Socialism about, but, by 
 getting rid of an obvious and acknow- 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 285 
 
 ledged brutality, it would bring into relief 
 the veiled economic tyranny oppressing 
 us, and thus advance Socalism. 
 
 Such to our mind is the only means, 
 joined to the gradual shifting of the 
 opinions and aspirations of the masses, 
 for bringing about the beginning of the 
 Socialistic system. Armed revolt or civil 
 war may be an incident of the struggle, 
 and in some form or another probably 
 will be, especially in the latter phases of 
 the revolution ; but in no case could it 
 supplant the afore-mentioned change in 
 popular feeling, and it must, at all events, 
 follow rather than precede it. 
 
 It is clear that the first real victory 
 of the Social Revolution will be the 
 establishment not indeed of a complete 
 system of communism in a day, which 
 is absurd, but of a revolutionary adminis- 
 tration whose definite and conscious aim 
 will be to prepare and further, in all 
 available ways, human life for such a 
 system — in other words, of an adminis- 
 tration whose every act will be of set 
 purpose with a view to Socialism. 
 
 We can therefore see clearly before us 
 a struggle which will end in realising a 
 
2 86 SOCIALISM 
 
 society wherein the means of production 
 are communised, and a relative equality 
 of condition as compared with modern 
 capitalistic society will be attained. This 
 and nothing less than this will be the 
 beginning of Socialism in the true sense 
 of the word ; but it cannot stop at this 
 point, but must have an immediate further 
 development, and one which we can 
 conceive of as being directly deducible 
 from it. This must form the subject 
 of our next and concluding chapter. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 TT is possible to succeed in a manner 
 in portraying to ourselves the life of 
 past times : that is, our imaginations 
 will show us a picture of them which 
 may include such accurate information 
 as we may have of them. But though 
 this may be a vivid delineation, and 
 though the information may be just, yet 
 it will not be a picture of what really 
 took place ; it will be made up of the 
 present which we experience, and the 
 past which our imagination, drawing 
 from our experience, conceives of — in 
 short, it will be our picture of the past. 
 If this be the case with the past, of which 
 we have some concrete data, still more 
 strongly may it be said of the future, of 
 
288 SOCIALISM 
 
 which we have none, nothing but mere 
 abstract deductions from historic evolu- 
 tion, the logical sequence of which may 
 be interfered with at any point by ele- 
 ments whose force we have not duly 
 appreciated ; and these are abstractions 
 also which are but the skeleton of the 
 full life which will go on in those times 
 to come. 
 
 Therefore, though we have no doubt 
 of the transformation of modern civilisa- 
 tion into Socialism, yet we cannot fore- 
 tell definitely what form the social life 
 of the future will take, any more than a 
 man living at the beginning of the com- 
 mercial period, say Sir Thomas More or 
 Lord Bacon, could foresee the state of 
 society at the end of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 Admitting that we are unable to realise 
 positively the life of the future, in which 
 the principle of real society will be uni- 
 versally accepted and applied in practice 
 as an everyday matter, yet the negative 
 side of the question we can all see, and 
 most of us cannot help trying to fill up 
 the void made by the necessary termina- 
 tion of the merely militant period of 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 289 
 
 Socialism. The present society will be 
 gone, with all its paraphernalia of checks 
 and safeguards ; that we know for certain. 
 No less surely we know what the founda- 
 tion of the new society will be. What 
 will the new society build on that foun- 
 dation of freedom and co - operation ? 
 That is the problem on which we can do 
 no more than speculate. 
 
 It must be understood therefore that 
 in giving this outline of the life of 
 the future, we are not dogmatising, 
 but only expressing our opinion of what 
 will probably happen, which is of course 
 coloured by our personal wishes and 
 hopes. We ask our readers, therefore, 
 not to suppose that we have here any 
 intention of making a statement of 
 facts, or prophesying in detail the exact 
 form which things will take ; though 
 in the main, what we here write will 
 be accepted by the majority of Socialists. 
 
 As to the political side of the new 
 society, civilisation undertakes the 
 government of persons by direct coercion. 
 Socialism would deal primarily with the 
 administration of things , and only second- 
 arily and indirectly would have to do 
 
 u 
 
290 SOCIALISM 
 
 with personal habit and conduct. Civil 
 law, therefore, which is an institution 
 essentially based on private property, 
 would cease to exist, and criminal law, 
 which would tend to become obsolete, 
 would, while it existed, concern itself 
 solely with the protection of the person. 
 It is clear, therefore, that there is no 
 foundation for the outcry sometimes 
 raised against Socialism for proposing to 
 interfere with the liberty of the individual, 
 which would be, in fact, only limited by 
 the natural and inevitable restrictions of 
 individual will incident to all societies 
 whatever. 
 
 As to the machinery by means of 
 which this administration of things would 
 be carried out, we ask our readers to try 
 to conceive of some such conditions as 
 these. 
 
 As we hinted in our last chapter, dur- 
 ing the transitional period the federal 
 principle would assert itself; and this, 
 - we believe, would develop at last into a 
 complete automatic system. 
 
 As indicated above, this principle 
 would work in a twofold way. First, 
 locally, as determined by geographical 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 291 
 
 and topographical position, race, and 
 language. Second, industrially, as deter- 
 mined by the occupations of people. 
 Topographically, we conceive of the 
 township as the lowest unit ; industrially, 
 of the trade or occupation organised 
 somewhat on the lines of a craft-guild. 
 In many instances the local branch of 
 the guild would be within the limits of 
 the township. 
 
 On the other hand, the highest unit 
 would be the great council of the social- 
 ised world, and between these would be 
 federations of localities arranged for con- 
 venience of administration. The great 
 federal organising power, whatever form 
 it took, would have the function of the 
 administration of production in its wider 
 sense. It would have to see to, for 
 instance, the collection and distribution of 
 all information as to the wants of popu- 
 lations and the possibilities of supplying 
 them, leaving all details to the subordi- 
 nate bodies, local and industrial. But 
 also it would be its necessary duty to 
 safeguard the then recognised principles 
 of society ; that is, to guard against any 
 country, or place, or occupation reverting 
 
292 SOCIALISM 
 
 to methods or practices which would be 
 destructive or harmful to the socialistic 
 order, such as any form of the exploita- 
 tion of labour, if that were possible, or 
 the establishment of any vindictive crimi- 
 nal law. Though in the lower units of 
 this great Federation direct expression 
 of opinion would suffice for carrying on 
 the administration, we cannot see any 
 other means than delegation for doing 
 the work of the higher circles. This 
 means that the development of society 
 beyond what we may call the adminis- 
 trative period cannot be foreseen as yet. 
 
 We now deal with the religious and 
 ethical basis of which the life of com- 
 munal society may be called an expres- 
 sion ; although from another aspect the 
 religion is an expression of that life — 
 the two thus forming a harmonious 
 whole. 
 
 The word religion is still in most minds 
 connected with supernatural beliefs, and 
 consequently its use has been thought 
 unjustifiable where this element is absent. 
 But, as we shall proceed to show, this 
 element is rather accessory to it than 
 essential. 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 293 
 
 At first religion had for its object the 
 continuance and glory of the kinship- 
 society, whether as clan, tribe, or people, 
 ancestor -worship forming the leading 
 feature in its early phases. That religion 
 should then have been connected with 
 what we now call superstition was in- 
 evitable, since no distinction was drawn 
 between human and other forms of 
 existence in animal life or in inanimate 
 objects, all being alike considered con- 
 scious and intelligent. 
 
 Consequently, with the development 
 of material civilisation from the domina- 
 tion of things by persons to that of 
 persons by things, and the falling 
 asunder of society into two classes, a 
 possessing and dominating class, and a 
 non-possessing and dominated one, there 
 arose a condition of life which gave 
 leisure for observation and reflection to 
 the former, that is, the privileged 
 class. Out of this reflection arose, the 
 distinction of man as a conscious being 
 apart from the rest of nature. From this 
 again was developed a dual conception 
 of things : on the one hand was man, 
 familiar and known ; on the other nature, 
 
294 SOCIALISM 
 
 mysterious and relatively unknown. In 
 nature itself there grew up a further dis- 
 tinction between its visible objects, now 
 regarded as unconscious things, and a 
 supposed motive power or " providence " 
 acting on them from behind. This was 
 conceived of as man-like in character, but 
 above mankind in knowledge and power, 
 and no longer indwelling in natural 
 objects, but without them, moving and 
 controlling them. 
 
 Another set of dual conceptions arose 
 along with this : firstly, the distinction 
 between the individual and society, and 
 secondly, within the individual, the dis- 
 tinction between the soul and the body. 
 Religion now became definitely super- 
 natural, and at last superstitious, in the 
 true sense of the word (superstites, sur- 
 viving), as far as the cultured class was 
 concerned, since it had gradually lost 
 its old habit of belief in it. 
 
 At this stage there arose a conflict not 
 only of belief but also of ethical concep- 
 tions ; the ceremonies and customs based 
 on the earlier ideas of a nature composed 
 of beings who were all conscious, became 
 meaningless and in many cases repulsive 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 295 
 
 to the advanced minds of the epoch ; 
 hence was born a system of esoteric ex- 
 planation, often embodied in certain secret 
 ceremonials termed Mysteries. These 
 Mysteries were a cultus embodying a 
 practice of the ancient rude ceremonies, 
 treated as revelations to certain privi- 
 leged persons of this hidden meaning, 
 which could not be understood by 
 the vulgar. That is, people began to 
 assume that the ancient rude and 
 sometimes coarse ceremonies (belief in 
 which directly as explanations of actual 
 events now appeared to them incredible) 
 wrapped up mystical meanings in an alle- 
 gorical manner ; e.g. a simple sun-myth 
 would be turned into an allegory of the 
 soul and the divinity, — their relative deal- 
 ings with a present and future life. An 
 importance began to be attached to the 
 idea of such future life for the individual 
 soul, which had nothing in common with 
 the old existence of a scarcely broken con- 
 tinuity of life, founded not on any posi- 
 tive doctrine, but on the impossibility 
 of an existing being conceiving of 
 its non-existence. This idea is naively 
 expressed in the burial ceremonies of all 
 
296 SOCIALISM 
 
 early races, in which food, horses, arms, 
 etc., are interred with the dead man as 
 a provision for his journey to the un- 
 known country. Similar notions, and 
 the doctrines and ceremonies embodying 
 them, grow in number and bulk as the 
 stream of history broadens down, till 
 they finally issue in the universal or 
 ethical religions (as opposed to the tribal 
 or nature-religions). Of these religions 
 Buddhism and Christianity are the great 
 historical examples, and in them the 
 original ceremonies and their meanings 
 have become fused with each other, and 
 with the new ethics, which they are sup- 
 posed to express more or less symbolically. 
 An illustration of what has here been 
 said may be found in the fusion of 
 the ancient notions of sacrifice in the 
 Christian dogma of the atonement. 1 
 
 We have said that with the rise of 
 civilisation tribal society became divided 
 into classes, owing to the growth of 
 individual, as opposed to corporate 
 ownership of property. The old rela- 
 tions of persons to society were thus 
 
 1 Cf. the article on " Sacrifice," by Professor Robertson 
 Smith, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition. 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 297 
 
 destroyed, and with them much of the 
 meaning of the old ethical ideas. In 
 the tribal state the responsibility of the 
 individual to the limited community of 
 which he formed a part was strongly felt, 
 while he recognised no duty outside this 
 community. In the new conception of 
 morality that now arose he had, it is true, 
 duties to all men as a man, irrespective 
 of his social group, but they were vague, 
 and could be evaded or explained away 
 with little disturbance of the conscience ; 
 because the central point round which 
 morality revolved was a spiritual deity, 
 who was the source and goal of all moral 
 aspiration, and directly revealed himself 
 to the individual conscience. These 
 two are the two ethical poles, first, the 
 tribal ethics, the responsibility to a com- 
 munity however limited, and, secondly, 
 the universal or introspective ethics, or 
 responsibility to a divinity, for whom 
 humanity was but a means of realising 
 himself. In these ethics the duties 
 of man to man were of secondary im- 
 portance. But though the tendency 
 was in this direction from the begin- 
 nings of civilisation, it took historically 
 
298 SOCIALISM 
 
 many centuries to realise itself, and 
 only reached its final development in 
 Christianity. 
 
 As regards the future form of the 
 moral consciousness, we may safely pre- 
 dict that it will be in a sense a return 
 on a higher level to the ethics of the 
 older world, with the difference that the 
 limitation of scope to the kinship group 
 in its narrower sense, which was one of 
 the causes of the dissolution of ancient 
 society, will disappear, and the identifi- 
 cation of individual with social interests 
 will be so complete that any divorce 
 between the two will be inconceivable 
 to the average man. 
 
 It will be noticed that we have above 
 been speaking of religion and morality 
 as distinct from one another. But the 
 religion of Socialism will be but the 
 ordinary ethics carried into a higher 
 atmosphere, and will only differ from 
 them in degi'ee of conscious responsi- 
 bility to one's fellows. Socialistic Ethics 
 would be the guide of our daily habit 
 of life ; socialistic religion would be 
 that higher form of conscience that 
 would impel us to actions on behalf 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 299 
 
 of a future of the race, such as no man 
 could command in his ordinary moods. 
 
 As to the particulars of life under the 
 Socialistic order, we may, to begin with, 
 say concerning marriage and the family 
 that it would be affected by the great 
 change, firstly in economics, and secondly 
 in ethics. The present marriage system 
 is based on the general supposition of 
 economic dependence of the woman on the 
 man, and the consequent necessity for his 
 making provision for her, which she can 
 legally enforce. This basis would dis- 
 appear with the advent of social economic 
 freedom, and no binding contract would 
 be necessary between the parties as regards 
 livelihood ; while property in children 
 would cease to exist, and every infant 
 that came into the world would be born 
 into full citizenship, and would enjoy 
 all its advantages, whatever the conduct 
 of its parents might be. Thus a new 
 development of the family would take 
 place, on the basis, not of a predeter- 
 mined lifelong business arrangement, to 
 be formally and nominally held to, 
 irrespective of circumstances, but on 
 mutual inclination and affection, an asso- 
 
3 oo SOCIALISM 
 
 ciation terminable at the will of either 
 party. It is easy to see how great the 
 gain would be to morality and senti- 
 ment in this change. At present, in 
 this country at least, a legal and quasi 
 moral offence has to be committed before 
 the obviously unworkable contract can 
 be set aside. On the Continent, it is 
 true, even at the present day the mar- 
 riage can be dissolved by mutual consent ; 
 but either party can, if so inclined, force 
 the other into subjection, and prevent 
 the exercise of his or her freedom. It 
 is perhaps necessary to state that this 
 change would not be made merely form- 
 ally and mechanically. There would be 
 no vestige of reprobation weighing on 
 the dissolution of one tie and the form- 
 ing of another. For the abhorrence of 
 the oppression of the man by the woman 
 or the woman by the man (both of 
 which continually happen to-day under 
 the aegis of our would-be moral institu- 
 tions) will certainly be an essential out- 
 come of the ethics of the New Society. 
 We may here note, as an example of 
 the hypocrisy of the modern marriage 
 system, that in the highest circles of 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 301 
 
 our society morganatic marriages incur 
 no blame at all. 
 
 The next point we have to call atten- 
 tion to is the occupations of mankind 
 under Communism. In the present 
 state of things, which is dominated by 
 capitalism and wage-earning, the repul- 
 siveness of all labour is assumed, the 
 sole motive power being economic 
 coercion from one end of the scale to 
 the other. Now it is true that the 
 original root of incitement to labour is 
 necessity ; but throughout the sentient 
 world this is accompanied by pleasure in ! 
 the successful exercise of energy. Indeed, 
 as beings rise in the scale of develop- 
 ment, the proportion of pleasure due to 
 the latter as compared with the pain 
 produced by coercion increases, always 
 presupposing the absence of artificial 
 and privileged coercion. For example, 
 the horse in his natural state delights 
 in running, and the dog in hunting, 
 while in the elementary conditions of 
 savage human life, certain ceremonies, 
 and adornments of weapons and the 
 like, point to a sense of pleasure and 
 dignity even in the process of the 
 
3Q2 SOCIALISM 
 
 acquisition of food. When we emerge 
 from vague primitive into early historic 
 barbarism, we find that this expression 
 of some degree of pleasure in labour 
 receives fresh impetus, and is everywhere 
 present in needful occupations. It was 
 from this turning of a necessary work 
 into amusement that definite art was 
 finally born. 
 
 As Barbarism began to give place to 
 early Civilisation, this solace of labour 
 fell asunder into duality like everything 
 else, and art became incidental and acces- 
 sory on the one side and independent and 
 primary on the other. We shall take 
 the liberty here of coining words, and 
 calling the first adjective, and the second 
 substantive art : meaning by adjective 
 art that which grew up unconsciously as 
 an amusement blended with the produc- 
 tion of ordinary wares more or less 
 permanent, from a house to a garment- 
 pin ; and by substantive, a piece of 
 craftsmanship whose raison d'etre was 
 to be a work of art, and which con- 
 veyed a definite meaning or story of 
 some kind. 
 
 In the civilisation of Greece, which 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 303 
 
 was so vigorous in throwing off bar- 
 barism, substantive art progressed very 
 speedily, more or less to the prejudice 
 of adjective art. As Roman despotism 
 dragged the ancient world into staleness 
 the triumphant substantive art withered 
 into lifeless academicism, till it was met by 
 the break-up of classical society. Under 
 the new access of barbarism, art, acted on 
 and reacting by, the remains of the classical 
 life, changed completely. Substantive 
 art almost disappeared and gave place 
 to a fresh development of adjective art, 
 so rich and copious as to throw into the 
 shade entirely the adjective art of the 
 past, and to fill up the void caused by 
 the waning of substantive art. Archi- 
 tecture, complete and elastic to adapt 
 itself to our necessities, was the birth 
 of this period ; the blossoming time of 
 which is dated by the name of the Em- 
 peror Justinian (<:. 520 a.d.) This great 
 adjective art developed into perfection 
 in the early Middle Ages, its zenith 
 being reached at the middle of the 
 thirteenth century. But its progress 
 was marked by the birth and gradual 
 growth of a new substantive art ; which, 
 
304 SOCIALISM 
 
 as the architecture of the Middle Ages 
 began to decline, became, if not more 
 expressive, yet at least more complex 
 and more completely substantive till the 
 Middle Ages were on the verge of dis- 
 solution. At last came the great change 
 in society marked by the Renaissance 
 enthusiasm and the Reformation ; and 
 as the excitement of that period began to 
 pass away, we find adjective art almost 
 gone, and substantive unconscious of 
 any purpose but the display of intellect 
 and dexterity of hand, the old long 
 enduring duality dying out into mere 
 nullity. 
 
 The upshot of this, so far as it con- 
 cerns the solace of necessary occupation, 
 is, that while substantive art went on with 
 many vicissitudes, amusing the upper 
 classes, commercialism killed all art for 
 the workman, depriving him necessarily 
 of the power of appreciating its higher, 
 and the opportunity of producing its 
 subsidiary form. In fact popular art 
 and popular religion were alike unsuit- 
 able to the working of the new system 
 of society, and were swept away by it. 
 
 It is no wonder then that almost all 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 305 
 
 modern economists (who seldom study 
 history, and never art), judging from what 
 is going on before their eyes, assume that 
 labour generally must be repulsive, and 
 that hence coercion must be always em- 
 ployed on the necessarily lazy majority. 
 Though it must be said, to the credit 
 of the Utopist socialists and of Fourier 
 especially, that they perceived instinct- 
 ively how futile was any hope of the 
 improvement of the race under such 
 circumstances. 
 
 We have seen that the divorce of the 
 workman from pleasure in his labour has 
 only taken place in modern times, for 
 we assert that, however it may be with 
 artless labour, art of any kind can never 
 be produced without pleasure. In this 
 case then, as in others, we believe that 
 the New Society will revert to the old 
 method, though on a higher plane. 
 With a very few exceptions Fourier 
 was right in asserting that all labour 
 could be made pleasurable under certain 
 conditions. These conditions are, briefly : 
 freedom from anxiety as to livelihood ; 
 shortness of hours in proportion to the 
 stress of the work ; variety of occupa- 
 
 x 
 
3 o6 SOCIALISM 
 
 tion if the work is of its nature mono- 
 tonous ; due use of machinery, i.e. the 
 use of it in labour which is essentially 
 oppressive if done by the hand ; oppor- 
 tunity for every one to choose the 
 occupation suitable to his capacity and 
 idiosyncrasy ; and lastly, the solacing 
 of labour by the introduction of orna- 
 ment, the making of which is enjoyable 
 to the labourer. As to this matter of 
 occupation we may here say a word on 
 machinery, which, as is now supposed 
 (not without reason), will one day do 
 away with all handiwork except, as is 
 thought, with the highest arts. 
 
 We should say that machinery will be 
 used in a way almost the reverse of the 
 present one. Whereas we now abstain 
 from using it in the roughest and most 
 repulsive work, because it does not pay, 
 in a socialist community its use will be 
 relegated almost entirely to such work, 
 •because in a society of equality every- 
 thing will be thought to pay which 
 dispenses the citizen from drudgery. 
 For the rest it must be admitted that 
 the tendency of modern industrialism is 
 towards the entire extinction of handi- 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 307 
 
 work by machinery ; but there is no 
 doubt that in the long run this will work 
 out its own contradiction. Machinery 
 having been perfected, mankind will turn 
 its attention to something else. We 
 shall then begin to free ourselves from 
 the terrible tyranny of machinery, and 
 the results of the great commercial epoch 
 which it has perfected ; we fully admit 
 that these results seem destined to overlap 
 from the capitalistic into the socialistic L^ 
 period. 
 
 We have dealt first with the adjective 
 arts because the practice of them is directly 
 affected by the change in economics 
 which is at the basis of the transforma- 
 tion of Civilisation into Socialism ; let 
 us now look at the substantive arts, 
 beginning, however, with architecture, 
 which is the link between the two cate- 
 gories, embracing as it does, when 
 complete, all the arts which appeal to 
 the eye. 
 
 Architecture, which is above all an art 
 of association, we believe must necessarily 
 be the art of a society of co-operation, 
 in which there will certainly be a ten- 
 dency towards the absorption of small 
 
3 o8 SOCIALISM 
 
 buildings into big ; and it must be 
 remembered that of all the arts it gives 
 most scope to the solace of labour by 
 due ornament. Sculpture, as in past 
 times, will be considered almost entirely 
 a part of fine building, the highest 
 expression of the beauty which turns 
 a utilitarian building into a great artistic 
 production. 
 
 Pictures again will surely be mostly 
 used for the decoration of buildings 
 which are specially public ; the circum- 
 stances of a society free from chronic 
 war, public, corporate, and private, can- 
 not fail to affect this art largely, at least 
 in its subjects, and probably will reduce 
 its independent importance. The arts 
 deduced from it, such as engraving, 
 will be no doubt widespread and much 
 used by persons in their private capacities. 
 
 As to literature, fiction as it is called, 
 when a peaceful and happy society has 
 been some time afoot, will probably die 
 out for want of material. The pabulum 
 of the modern novel in its various dress- 
 ings is mostly provided by the anomalies 
 and futilities of a society of inequality 
 wielded by a conventional false sense of 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 309 
 
 duty, which produces the necessary im- 
 broglio wherewith to embarrass the hero 
 and heroine through the due number 
 of pages. Literature, however, need by 
 no means die ; for we can neither limit 
 nor foresee the development of the great 
 art of poetry which has changed so little 
 in essentials since the Homeric epics. 
 
 We must also note the difference (not 
 generally considered) between literature as 
 a fine art and the numberless useful 
 books which are adjuncts, or tools rather, 
 for other occupations, physical science in 
 all its branches amongst the number. 
 Science again will be freed from the 
 utilitarian chains which commerce has 
 cast over it, and, cultivated once more 
 for its own sake, and not merely as a 
 servant of profit-making industrialism, 
 may be expected to develop in a manner 
 at present undreamed of. 
 
 To return again to the subject of art 
 proper. Of ancient Music we know little 
 in spite of Aristotle and Boetius. Modern 
 music begins at the close of the Middle 
 Ages with the birth of counterpoint ; its 
 great development has been during the 
 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and 
 
310 SOCIALISM 
 
 has been in its earlier period synchronous 
 with the most degraded period of all the 
 other arts. Classical music (technically 
 so-called) would seem to have reached its 
 zenith about the middle of the present 
 century ; but the great revolution in 
 dramatic music, effected by Wagner dur- 
 ing the second half of the century, has 
 occupied the field for the present, though 
 what future developments it may have 
 we cannot foresee. Of one thing, how- 
 ever, we may be very certain, that under 
 a quite changed social condition Music 
 will develop completely new styles of its 
 own no less than the other arts. And in 
 our belief Music and Architecture, each 
 in its widest sense, will form the most 
 serious occupation of the greatest number 
 of people. In this connection we may 
 observe that Music is on the executive 
 side largely dependent on co-operation, 
 notwithstanding that on the creative side 
 it is more, rather than less, individual than 
 painting. 
 
 A word may be said about the 
 Drama, connected as it is on one side 
 with Music and on the other with 
 Literature. It is again as to its execu- 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 311 
 
 tion wholly a co-operative art, while 
 its creation is necessarily subordinate to 
 the possibilities of execution inherent in 
 a given time and place. For the rest 
 its production does not require the same 
 amount of training as any other of 
 the arts ; and therefore could be more 
 easily and pleasantly dealt with by a com- 
 munal society working co-operatively. 
 
 Though the question of costume may 
 seem a petty one, it has much to do with 
 the pleasure of life. In the future the 
 tyranny of convention will be abolished ; 
 reason and a sense of pleasure will rule. 
 It must be remembered that bad costume, 
 of which there are hardly any examples 
 before the Tudor period, always either 
 muffles up or caricatures the body ; 
 whereas good costume at once veils and 
 indicates it. Another fault may be noted 
 in all bad periods (as in the present), that 
 an extreme difference is made between 
 the garments of the sexes. It is not too 
 much to hope that the future society 
 which will revolutionise architecture, 
 will not fail to do as much for costume, 
 which is as necessary an adornment as 
 architecture. 
 
312 SOCIALISM 
 
 To turn to some other phases of life 
 under the new order. We believe that 
 on no consideration will the dirt and 
 squalor which now disgrace a manu- 
 factory or a railway station be tolerated. 
 As things go this wretchedness of ex- 
 ternals is unchallenged because, once more, 
 it does not pay even to reduce the filth 
 to a minimum. But, as we said before, 
 everything that makes towards the plea- 
 sure of life in a communal state will 
 pay if it be possible to be done. There- 
 fore it is clear that the degradation 
 of a whole country by careless industrial- 
 ism will not be allowed. Granted the 
 dirt and squalor reduced to a minimum, 
 which we think would leave but a small 
 residuum, how is the burden of even that 
 small residuum to be dealt with ? It being 
 understood that the manufacture in 
 question is a necessary one, say, for 
 example, iron-founding, there would be 
 two ways, either of which might be chosen. 
 First, to have volunteers working tem- 
 porarily in a strictly limited and com- 
 paratively small " black-country," which 
 would have the advantage of leaving the 
 rest of the country absolutely free from 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 313 
 
 the disorder and dirt. And secondly, to 
 spread the manufacture in small sections 
 over a territory so large that in each 
 place the disadvantages would be little 
 felt. This would have the gain of 
 enabling those who worked at it to live 
 amidst tolerably agreeable surroundings. 
 A difficulty of the same sort would 
 have to be met with in the towns. 
 Great aggregations of houses would 
 clearly not be absolutely necessary. These 
 are now of two kinds : first, the manu- 
 facturing towns, which are seldom 
 capitals, or of importance as centres of 
 anything else than the commerce con- 
 nected with their special industries, 
 Manchester being an obvious example of 
 this class of great town. The other 
 kind of overgrown town gives us ex- 
 amples of great capitals, which are 
 essentially seats of centralised govern- 
 ment, and of general financial operations, 
 and incidentally and consequently of 
 intellectual movement. For example, 
 institutions like the British Museum, the 
 Louvre or Bibliotheque Nationale, the 
 Berlin Royal Library, or the Galleries at 
 Dresden could hardly exist except in 
 
3H SOCIALISM 
 
 capital cities. As to the manufacturing 
 towns, it is clear that according to either 
 of the theories of factory work put for- 
 ward above, they would be superfluous, 
 while on the other hand there would be 
 no great centres of government or finance 
 to attract huge populations or to keep 
 them together. In the future therefore 
 towns and cities will be built and in- 
 habited simply as convenient and pleasur- 
 able systems of dwelling-houses, which 
 would include of course all desirable 
 public buildings. 
 
 Again we give three theories of the 
 transformation of the modern town, 
 industrial or capital, into the kind of 
 entity to suit the new social conditions. 
 The first would leave the great towns 
 still existing, but would limit the popu- 
 lation on any given space ; it would 
 insist on cleanliness and airiness, the 
 surrounding and segregation of the 
 houses by gardens ; the erecting of noble 
 public buildings ; the maintenance of 
 educational institutions of all kinds — 
 of theatres, libraries, workshops, taverns, 
 kitchens, etc. This kind of town might 
 be of considerable magnitude, and the 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 315 
 
 houses in it might not be very different 
 in size and arrangement from what they 
 are now, although the life lived in 
 them would have been transformed. It 
 is understood, of course, that any associa- 
 tion in dwelling in such places would 
 be quite voluntary, although in view 
 of the limitation above mentioned, no 
 individual or group could be allowed 
 to engross an undue area. 
 
 The second method of dealing with 
 the unorganised and anarchic towns of 
 to-day proposes their practical abolition, 
 and the supplanting of them in the main 
 by combined dwellings built more or less 
 on the plan of the colleges of our older 
 English universities. As to the size of 
 these, that would have to be determined 
 by convenience in each case, but the 
 tendency would be to make them so 
 large as to be almost small towns of 
 themselves ; since they would have to 
 include a large population in order to 
 foster the necessary give and take of 
 intellectual intercourse, and make them 
 more or less independent for ordinary 
 occupation and amusement. 
 
 It is to be understood that this system 
 
316 SOCIALISM 
 
 of dwellings would not necessarily pre- 
 clude the existence of quite small groups, 
 and houses suitable to them, although 
 we think that these would tend to be- 
 come mere eccentricities. 
 
 Yet another suggestion may be 
 sketched as follows : — a centre of a 
 community, which can be described as a 
 very small town with big houses, includ- 
 ing various public buildings, the whole 
 probably grouped about an open space. 
 Then a belt of houses gradually diminish- 
 ing in number and more and more 
 spaced out, till at last the open country 
 should be reached, where the dwellings, 
 which would include some of the above- 
 mentioned colleges, should be sporadic. 
 
 We might go on furnishing sug- 
 gestions, in which, however, as above, 
 cross divisions are sure to occur. What 
 we have given, however, we think quite 
 enough, for they are clearly the birth 
 of our own prepossessions. One thing, 
 however, all such schemes must take for 
 granted as a matter of principle, to wit 
 the doing away of all antagonism between 
 town and country, and all tendency for 
 the one to suck the life out of the other. 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 317 
 
 As regards Education, it should be 
 borne in mind that it must of necessity 
 cease to be a preparation for a life of 
 commercial success on the one hand, or 
 of irresponsible labour on the other ; and 
 therefore in either case a short and per- 
 functory exercise with a definite object, 
 more or less sordid in view. It will 
 become rather a habit of making the 
 best of the individual's powers in all 
 directions to which he is led by his 
 innate disposition ; so that no man 
 will ever " finish " his education while 
 he is alive, and his early training will 
 never lie behind him a piece of mere 
 waste, as it most often does now. 
 
 In what we have been stating we have 
 only been dealing with some of the 
 elementary principles of Socialism Tri- 
 umphant, and certain of those aspects of 
 life resulting from them that lie nearest 
 the surface ; but at least we have tried 
 to make our belief clear, that in the 
 new order of things, while no one will be 
 hampered by false ideas of duty, every 
 one will have before him a broad ideal 
 by which he may regulate his conduct 
 with assurance and peace of mind. He 
 
318 SOCIALISM 
 
 will find his pleasure in the satisfaction, 
 first, of his bodily desires, and then 
 of the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic 
 needs which will inevitably arise when a 
 man is not at odds with his body, and is 
 not exhausting his intellect in a vain 
 combat with its urgent promptings. It 
 will be necessary for him then as always 
 to labour in order to live, but he will 
 share that labour in equitable propor- 
 tions with all his fellows ; and, moreover, 
 he will at last be able to turn man's 
 mastery over nature to account in reliev- 
 ing him of the mere drudgery of toil. 
 What remains of labour, by wise use 
 of opportunity and due observation of 
 the various capacities of mankind he 
 will turn into a pleasurable exercise of 
 his energies ; and thus between his rest 
 and his work will at the least lead a life 
 of happiness, which he will be able to 
 enjoy without imputing it to himself for 
 wickedness ; a habit of mind which, 
 under the prevailing ethical ideas, casts 
 a gloom over so many of those who 
 may be considered to belong to the 
 more intellectual of the well-to-do 
 classes. 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 319 
 
 As to his external surroundings, the 
 society of the future will be wealthy 
 enough to spare labour from the produc- 
 tion of the only things now allowed to 
 be utilities, for cultivating the decencies 
 of life, so that all manufacture will be 
 carried on in an orderly and cleanly 
 manner, and the face of the earth will be 
 beautified and not degraded by man's 
 labour and habitation. Another tyranny 
 will be overthrown in our release from 
 the compulsion of living in over-grown 
 and over-crowded towns, and our houses 
 and their surroundings will be dealt with 
 in a reasonable manner. 
 
 Education will no longer be applied 
 to the fortuitous cramming of unwilling 
 children, and of young men intensely 
 desirous of doing anything else than 
 being educated, — and only submitting to 
 that process for the sake of getting on in 
 their careers, — and will become one of 
 the most serious businesses of life even to 
 men of the greatest natural capacities. 
 Such a life, it is clear, will be pretty 
 much the reverse of that which some 
 opponents of the new order, scientists as 
 well as meaner personages, profess to see 
 
3 20 SOCIALISM 
 
 in the advancing " tyranny of Socialism." 
 But we are convinced that this life, 
 which means general happiness for all 
 men, free from any substratum of slavery, 
 will be forced on the world. Yet that 
 world will not be wholly conscious of 
 the gradual and natural compulsion which 
 it will have to yield to, and which 
 it will find by its results to have been 
 wholly beneficent. 
 
 We may be asked, since we have been 
 continuously putting forward the doc- 
 trine of evolution throughout these 
 pages, what Socialism in its turn will 
 evolve. We can only answer that 
 Socialism denies the finality of human 
 progress, and that any particular form of 
 Socialism of which we can now conceive 
 must necessarily give way before fresh 
 and higher developments, of the nature 
 of which, however, we can form no idea. 
 These developments are necessarily 
 hidden from us by the unfinished 
 struggle in which we live, and in which 
 therefore for us the supreme goal must 
 be Socialism as we have here expounded 
 it. We would be the very last to wish 
 to set any bounds to human ideals or 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 321 
 
 aspirations ; but the Socialism which we 
 can foresee, and which promises to us the 
 elevation of mankind to a level of 
 intelligent happiness and pleasurable 
 energy unattained as yet, is to us enough 
 as an ideal for our aspirations and as an 
 incentive to our action. 
 
NOTE ON THE "CITY" 
 
 (Cf. Cap. II.) 
 
 In Hebrew history the point referred to in 
 the text may be remarked in the confusion 
 of ideas between the mere Burg or hill 
 fortress (Zion or Sihon) of the earlier days 
 of Jerusalem and the later developed Holy 
 City, schism from which was criminal in the 
 eyes of the pious Hebrew, as the earliest seat 
 of the federalised nation. The same thing is 
 obvious in the genealogical history of Early 
 Greece, of which we may take Athens as a 
 type ; the great tragedies, as the trilogies of 
 iEschylus, illustrate this, the actual city play- 
 ing its part in the scenery as in the Ewnenides. 
 Here then we have three great cities — Troy, 
 Jerusalem, Athens, proclaiming themselves 
 obviously as centres of the new society and 
 rising conspicuously above the welter of the 
 tribes and the heoS ; but though these are 
 obvious cases, the same thing was going on 
 throughout the whole of the growing world of 
 
324 SOCIALISM 
 
 ancient civilisation. The Oriental monarchies, 
 when looked at closely, turn out to have been 
 compressed confederacies of cities. These 
 flourished so long as the cities composing 
 them retained some individuality, but their 
 life was at last crushed out by monarchical 
 and despotic centralisation. As a consequence 
 the system which they formed was either 
 broken up by the surrounding uncivilised 
 tribes, as Accadian Babylon by the Assyrians, 
 and Assyria in its turn by the Medes, or 
 stagnated into huge lifeless bureaucracies, as 
 in the case of China or Egypt. The life of 
 the latter existed in the emulation of the cities 
 of Memphis, Thebes, etc., and lay in abeyance 
 between the time of the Persian invasion and 
 the rise under the Ptolemies of the Greek city 
 of Alexandria. 
 
 Everywhere, in short, in the ancient world, 
 one is struck by the preponderance of the 
 city. Tyre is a mighty power, Carthage a 
 great empire ; nay, the mere material aggre- 
 gation of buildings, the shrine, so to say, 
 of the city -organisation, is all -important, 
 and the territory a mere farm or recruiting 
 ground ; the long walls fall to the music of 
 Lysander's flutes, and Athens becomes an 
 appanage of the Dorians ; Carthaginian walls 
 are breached, and the huge Semitic empire 
 becomes a part of the realm of the mightiest 
 city of all. Nowhere is there independence, 
 unity, progress, save where a city knits up the 
 
NOTE ON THE "CITY" 325 
 
 energies and gives form to the aspirations of 
 men, providing an aim for which their virtue 
 (valour) may expend itself. 
 
 It may here be noted that during all this 
 time ethics and religion were developing on 
 one line ; in the earlier barbarism there was 
 no distinction between society and nature ; 
 man was the sole rational type ; the gods 
 were wholly anthropomorphous, and even 
 amidst the delicate poetry of Homer at times 
 grotesquely so ; man was everything, the rest 
 was homogeneous with him. Nature- gods 
 were the ancestors of society, the heads of 
 gentes and tribes traced their descent quite 
 frankly by mere begettal from the highest. 
 Heracles, Jove, Mavors, Woden were no 
 forces exterior to the life of the existing 
 people of the Hellenes, the Latins, or the 
 Goths, but veritable material ancestors, so 
 many counted generations back. Their most 
 tragic stories, embodied in the noblest poetry 
 which the world has seen, and perhaps will 
 ever see, — looked upon as no chance fictions 
 or literary inventions, but rather as pieces of 
 inspired history,^were but episodes of the 
 great story, blossoms of the genealogical tree 
 of the existing child of Atreus or Wolsmeg. 
 This tendency for the identification of man 
 with everything sensible or insensible, animate 
 or inanimate, is again illustrated by totem 
 worship, necessitated also by the more obvious 
 reason of the early absence of monogamous or 
 
326 SOCIALISM 
 
 even polygamous institutions. The gods 
 themselves change without degradation into 
 the forms of beast and bird, so that the chiefs 
 of the gens could feel no shame in taking 
 their names from the bear, the wolf, or the 
 eagle, and giving them in turn to the whole 
 groups. Amongst the Hebrews, too, it is 
 clear that the so-called patriarchs were really 
 nature-gods ; the names of chiefs were fre- 
 quently compounded of the word Baal — that 
 is " god," a fact naively recognised by the 
 historians of the later and orthodox period 
 by their changing Baal into El or Ja, the 
 special names of the Hebrew tribal God. 
 Similarly Abram is the high heaven, like 
 Zeus or Jove. 
 
 This line of religion was still followed up 
 in the period of ancient civilisation ; the 
 state and religion were one, as is indicated 
 amongst other things by the temples having 
 been used as popular meeting -places for 
 pleasure, law or business. In short, in the 
 ancient world, religion was ancestor-worship, 
 developing, as the gens and the heoS gave 
 place to the city, into city-worship, in which 
 the individual only felt his more elevated life 
 as a part of the Holy City that had made him 
 and his what they were, and would lead them 
 to all excellence and glory. 
 
 We have mentioned that the city -con- 
 federacies of the East which assumed the 
 appearance to later ages of great despotic 
 
NOTE ON THE "CITY" 327 
 
 monarchies fell either into demoralisation or 
 languid bureaucracy. From Asia the lead 
 in civilisation passed to Europe, and the 
 progress of humanity became speedy and 
 brilliant. But the Ancient Civilisation, in- 
 complete, founded on oligarchy, political and 
 intellectual, and on industrial slavery of the 
 crudest kind, had to undergo the law of 
 change. The Greek cities, after fierce 
 struggles among themselves for the leader- 
 ship of their world, fell, destroyed by in- 
 dividual greed for position and fame, that 
 took the place of the old city -worship. 
 Their fall was helped by the new system of 
 individualistic ethics, which put forward as 
 the aim of life the excellence and moral 
 qualities of the individual, looked at in him- 
 self, instead of those of the society of which 
 he formed a part. Thus Greek civilisation 
 fell into the clutches of the Tyrants, and 
 again the lead passed westward into the hands 
 of Rome — the most complete, self-contained 
 and powerful development of the city-world. 
 But again, as her power grew and the wealth 
 of her oligarchy with it, the doom was await- 
 ing ; the boundless greed of the great slave- 
 holding and tax -gathering capitalists, the 
 conquerors of the ancient world, led them 
 into a condition of chaos, from which they 
 had to be rescued by an imperial bureaucracy. 
 It was the function of the latter, on the one 
 hand, to keep peace between the competitors 
 
328 SOCIALISM 
 
 for monstrous wealth, and, on the other, to 
 hold down and pacify the proletariat and 
 subject barbarians, on whom the oligarchy fed. 
 Steady degradation followed the Augustan 
 " Pax Romana " ; the whole of the mighty 
 power of Rome, the growth of so many 
 centuries of energy and valour, was prosti- 
 tuted to the squeezing of taxes from the 
 Roman world ; the very form of the city- 
 society was reduced to an absurdity by the 
 sale of citizenship, until Caracalla abolished 
 its mere form, extending it to all freed men. 
 At last the Roman armies were wholly com- 
 posed of Gauls and Goths, Armenians and 
 Arabs ; no Italian could be found willing to 
 fight for his life much less for the sham 
 state, good only for tax -gathering, which 
 now represented the once great city. Rome 
 fell, and with it the Ancient World. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Absolute surplus-value, 259 
 Accumulation, Marx on primi- 
 tive, 264-66 
 Administration in the future, 
 
 methods of, 290-92 
 Adventurers, the Elizabethan, 
 
 ill 
 Agriculture, the chief industry 
 
 of the classical world, 49 
 Anabaptist rising, the, 102 
 Ancestor-worship, 29, 30, 33, 
 
 34, 326 
 Ancient barbarism, 23-31 
 
 „ civilisation, develop- 
 ment of, 32-47 
 Arbitration as a substitute for 
 
 war, 284 
 Architecture, 303, 307 
 Art at the beginning of the 
 18th century, 121 
 „ in France before the 
 
 Revolution, 132 
 „ its historical development, 
 
 3° 2 "5 
 „ modern, 14, 15 
 „ under Socialism, 307, 308 
 Artisans, condition of skilled, 
 
 273-75 
 Athenian Gentes, the, 40, 42 
 
 Babceuf (Gracchus), his propa- 
 ganda, 157 
 Barbaric religion, 29, 30 
 Barbarism, ancient, 23-31 
 Blanc (Louis), 226-29 
 Buddhism, 296 
 
 Cabet's communistic experi- 
 ment, 217 
 Capital, constant and variable, 
 
 255-58 
 Capitalistic brutality, 41 
 
 „ production, 241-47 
 
 Catholicism, 95-98 
 Charters to towns, the granting 
 
 of, 73 
 Chartist movement, beginning 
 of the, 177, 178 
 „ decay of the, 180- 
 
 82 
 „ defects of the, 179 
 
 „ schism in the, 
 
 179-80 
 Chattel slavery, growth of, 36 
 „ into mediaeval serf- 
 
 dom, merging of, 
 
 .50. 51 
 „ origin of, 28 
 
33° 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 Christian Socialist, De Lamen- 
 nais a type of, 223-25 
 
 Christianity, 296 
 
 „ mediaeval, 64-67 
 
 Church as a temporal power, 
 the, 64-67 
 
 Cities, development of life in, 
 
 3.2-37 
 " City," first appearance of the, 
 29 
 „ Note on the, 323 
 Civil war in the time of Charles 
 
 I., the, 114, 115 
 Civilisation, ancient, 32-47 
 „ not the final form of 
 human society, 
 modern, 16 
 Civilisations, four great, 37 
 Classes will cease to exist, 173 
 Cobbett (William), 175 
 Colbert in France, the rule of, 
 
 Commercial ethics, 10, 11 
 Commercialism, the rise of, 88- 
 
 Commodities, circulation of, 
 
 248-55 
 Commodity, Marx's definition 
 
 of a, 233 
 Commune of Paris, bloodthirsty 
 suppression of 
 the, 201 
 „ establishment of 
 
 the, 199 
 „ events that pre- 
 
 ceded the, 196- 
 
 „ international char- 
 
 acter of the, 200 
 
 „ movement in 
 
 Vienna in sym- 
 pathy with the, 
 203 
 
 Communist Manifesto, the, 
 
 190, 231, 278 
 Communistic experiments, 217 
 Competition, foreign, 170, 
 
 171 
 Constant capital, 255-58 
 Constitutional party govern- 
 ment, birth of, 119 
 Co-operation advocated by 
 Fourier, in- 
 dustrial, 215 
 „ advocated by 
 
 Pierre le 
 Roux, 225 
 „ and Chartism, 
 
 181 
 Corporations, derived from the 
 " Mark," 67 
 „ their relations 
 
 with the 
 nobility, 71, 
 
 72, 74, 75 
 Councils, County, 280-82 
 
 „ District and Parish, 
 
 280-82 
 Craft-guilds, their growth, 69 
 „ their municipal 
 
 power, 70 
 „ their religious 
 
 character, 65 
 „ their transform- 
 
 ation, 87 
 Criminal law, mechanical char- 
 acter of, 22, 23 
 Cromwell's revolution, 1 14-16 
 
 Danton, 148-55 
 
 Decentralisation, 280 
 
 Democratic Federation, forma- 
 tion of the, 185 
 
 Depression, cycles of, 169, 272, 
 273 
 
INDEX 
 
 331 
 
 " Division of Labour " system, 
 
 the, 161, 243-47 
 Drama under Socialism, the, 
 
 310 
 
 Education under Socialism, 
 
 3 X 7, 3 J 9 
 Eight hours legal day, demand 
 
 for the, 271-73 
 Encyclopaedists, the, 127 
 Engels (Frederick), 231, 232 
 „ on Saint Simon, 
 
 212, 213 
 English political movements, 
 
 174-87 
 Ethics, commercial, 10, 11 
 
 „ of Socialism, 298 
 Evangelicanism, 1 1 
 
 „ temporary disappear- 
 ance of 118 
 Exchange, 249-55 
 Exchange-value, 233 
 
 Fabian Society, the, 186 
 Factory Acts, the first, 166 
 Familia, the Roman, 26, 46 
 Family, origin of the mono- 
 gamous, 27 
 „ relations, modern con- 
 ventional, 4-8, 299 
 „ the primitive patri- 
 
 archal, 26 
 „ under Socialism, the, 
 299 
 Federal principle, the, 290-92 
 Federation, Industrial, 283 
 Federation, Social Democratic, 
 
 185 
 Fourier (Charles), 213-16 
 Franco-German war, outcome 
 of the, 194 
 „ Socialist protest 
 
 against, 197 
 
 " Free Labourers " in the later 
 
 Middle Ages, 86 
 French Revolution, the, 136-58 
 „ causes a reaction 
 
 in England, 175 
 "Fronde," the, 113, 124 
 
 Gens, the, 25 
 
 „ in Homer, indications of 
 the, 38 
 Gentes, the Athenian, 40, 42 
 German Socialist party, the, 
 
 203, 204 
 Germany, Peasant War in, 101, 
 
 102 
 Girondins, the, 150-53 
 Grosse, his work on the 
 
 Merchant Guild, 68 
 Guilds, foundation of, 69 
 „ of journeymen, 86 
 „ represented on corpora- 
 tions, 70 
 „ the merchant, 68 
 
 Hammersmith Socialist So- 
 ciety, the, 186 
 
 Handicraft in production, dis- 
 appearance of, 171 
 
 Handiwork to be abolished save 
 with the highest arts, 306 
 
 History, 18th century view of, 
 20 
 
 Huguenots, the, 1 10 
 
 Icaria, Cabet's, 217 
 Industrial Federation, 283 
 
 „ revolution in Eng- 
 land, 159-73 
 „ struggle, change in 
 the character of 
 the, 271 
 Industries under Socialism, 312 
 
332 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 International Association — 
 
 founded, 183, 184 
 „ culminates in the 
 
 Paris Com- 
 mune, 184, 196 
 „ falls to pieces, 201, 
 
 202 
 International Parliament, an, 
 284 
 
 Jacobins, the, 150, 151 
 Jansenists, the sect of, 127, 135 
 Jesuits, the, 98, 99, 126, 127 
 
 „ usury not condemned 
 by the, 99 
 Journeyman, appearance of the, 
 
 86 
 
 Kapital, Marx's Das, 232-67 
 
 LABouR-power, 237-41 
 Labour system, division of, 161, 
 
 2 43-47 , 
 Labourers in the Middle Ages, 
 
 free, 86 
 Lamennais (De), 223-25 
 Lancashire, change in the char- 
 acter of, 163 
 Lasalle (Ferdinand), 203, 204 
 Law, criminal, 22, 23 
 Le Roux (Pierre), 225, 226 
 Levellers, revolts of the, 116 
 Liberal party, the, 182 
 
 „ and Continental 
 
 movements, 183 
 
 Literature at the beginning of 
 
 the 1 8th century, 
 
 121 
 
 „ in France before the 
 
 Revolution, 131 
 „ ofthefuture,3o8,309 
 Louis XIV., his ideal of the 
 expansion of France, 125 
 
 Louis XV. and his parliaments 
 (law courts), 128 
 „ and the Jesuits, 128 
 
 Louis XVI., 137-52 
 Luddites, the, 164 
 Lycurgan legislation misunder- 
 stood in modern times, 39, 40 
 
 Machine industries, creation 
 
 of, 165 
 
 „ effects of its 
 
 growth, 177 
 
 Machinery, introduction of, 165 
 
 „ perfecting of, 171 
 
 „ subjection of man 
 
 to, 260, 261 
 „ under Socialism, use 
 
 of, 306 
 Manifesto, the Communist, 
 
 190, 231, 278 
 Manufactories in the future, 
 
 312 
 Marat, 147, 1 51-54 
 " Mark," the, 67 
 Market, origin of the, 35 
 Marriage and the family under 
 
 Socialism, 299 
 Marriage system, the present, 
 
 299, 300 
 Marx (Karl), 219, 230-67 
 „ on primitive accumu- 
 lation, 264-66 
 Maximum for necessaries of 
 life suggested, 
 legal, 279 
 „ under the Terror, 
 
 law of, 154 
 Mediaeval Christianity, 64-67 
 „ Society, 60-75 
 
 „ towns, origin of, 67- 
 
 69 
 Merchant Guild, the, 68 
 
INDEX 
 
 333 
 
 Middle Ages, as represented by 
 bourgeois his- 
 torians, 76, 77 
 
 „ conceptions of a 
 
 future state in 
 the, 82 
 
 „ conceptions of 
 
 the universe in 
 the, 79 
 
 „ contrasted with 
 
 that of to-day, 
 misery of, 80- 
 82 
 
 „ popular art in 
 
 the, 83 
 
 „ religion of the, 
 
 64-67 
 Middle class, foundation of the 
 present, 87 
 
 „ poorer section of 
 
 the, 275 
 
 „ revolution under 
 
 Cromwell, 114- 
 16 
 
 „ stands aloof from 
 
 Chartism, 178 
 
 „ to be absorbed in 
 
 the proletariat, 
 173 
 
 „ political emanci- 
 
 pation of the, 
 176 
 
 „ triumph of the, 
 
 172 
 Minimum legal wage suggested, 
 
 a, 279 
 Modern history, beginning of 
 
 the first period of, 103 
 Moliere's comedies show the 
 corruption of the times, 
 
 Money as a measure of value, 
 235, 248 
 
 Money, its function in ex- 
 change, 248-55 
 
 Monogamy, origin of, 27 
 
 Morality of the present age, 
 the, 10, 1 1 
 
 Movements of 1830 and 1848, 
 189-91 
 
 Municipal functions, extension 
 of, 280 
 
 Miinzer (Thomas), his revolt, 
 101 
 
 Music in the past and in the 
 future, 309, 310 
 
 Mysteries, the, 53, 295 
 
 Mystery Plays, the, 66 
 
 National workshops in 1848, 
 
 227, 228 
 Nationalisation of the means 
 
 of production, 280 
 Nations, rise of political, 100 
 Nature-gods, 325, 326 
 
 Occultism of the Renaissance 
 
 period, 94 
 Occupations under Socialism, 
 
 301 
 Owen (Robert), 207-10, 216 
 
 „ compared with Saint 
 
 Simon, 211 
 
 Paris Commune, the, 196-201 
 
 Parliament, an international, 
 284 
 
 Parties, political, 12, 13 
 
 Patriarchal family, the primi- 
 tive, 26 
 
 Peace and War, questions of, 
 283, 284 
 
 Peasant War in Germany, the, 
 101, 102 
 
 Philosophes, Les, 134 
 
 Plebs, the Roman, 43 
 
334 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 "Plug Riots," the, 165 
 Political movements, English, 
 174-87 
 „ nations, rise of, 100 
 Politics of the Renaissance 
 period, 99 
 party, 11-13 
 Poor law, the Elizabethan, 106 
 Prime ministers as temporary 
 
 kings, 104. 
 Primitive community, the, 23- 
 
 Production, capitalistic, 241-4.7 
 Protestantism, 95-7 
 Proudhon, 218-23 
 Puritanism, its growth illus- 
 trated, 116 
 „ its obscure origin, 97 
 
 Quietists, the sect of, 127 
 
 Racine's dead classicalism, 131 
 Radicalism, the beginning of, 
 
 175 
 Reform Act of 1832, the, 176 
 
 Reformation, the, 95, 96 
 
 Regency period in France, 
 
 corruption of the, 129 
 
 Relative surplus-value, 259 
 
 Religion of barbarism, the, 29, 
 
 30 
 
 „ of modern society, the, 
 
 8,9 
 „ of Socialism, the, 298 
 
 „ of the Renaissance 
 
 period, the, 94, 95 
 
 „ treated historically, 
 
 293-97 
 
 Religious character of the State 
 
 in the Middle Ages, 
 
 65 
 „ wars, 108, 109 
 
 Renaissance period, its occult- 
 ism, 94 
 „ its politics, 99 
 
 „ its religion, 94, 95 
 
 „ its science, 94 
 
 Republicans in France, the first, 
 
 142 
 Revolution, French, 136-58 
 
 „ in England, Crom- 
 
 well's, 1 14-16 
 Revolution, in England, in- 
 dustrial, 159-73 
 Robespierre (Maximilian), 154- 
 
 Roman Familia, the, 26, 46 
 
 „ Plebs, the, 43 
 Rome, early, 43, 44 
 
 „ fall of, 328 
 Russian Socialist movement, 
 
 the, 204, 205 
 
 Sabbatarianism in the time of 
 
 James I., ill 
 Saint Simon, 210-13, 2I ^ 
 Savage races of to-day possibly 
 
 different from early historical 
 
 races, 30, 31 
 Science of the future, 309 
 Serfdom, break-up of, 85 
 
 „ origin of, 28 
 Skilled artisans, their condition, 
 
 2 73-75 . 
 Slavery, origin of, 27, 28 
 
 Smith (Adam), 162 
 
 Social Democratic Federation, 
 
 the, 185 
 
 Socialism amongst Chartists, 
 
 ideas of, 177 
 
 „ art under, 307, 308 
 
 „ costume under, 311 
 
 „ drama under, 310 
 
 „ education under, 317, 
 
 319 
 
INDEX 
 
 335 
 
 Socialism, ethics of, 298 
 
 „ family relations under, 
 
 299, 300 
 „ how to bring about, 
 
 280-85 
 „ in Germany, 203, 204 
 „ in Russia, 204, 205 
 „ literature under, 308, 
 
 3°9 
 „ manufactories under, 
 
 312 
 „ marriage under, 299, 
 
 300 
 „ militant, 268-86 
 „ music under, 309, 310 
 „ occupations under, 
 
 301 
 „ religion of, 298 
 „ science under, 309 
 „ scientific, 230 
 „ triumphant, 287-321 
 „ women under, 299, 
 300 
 State, functions of the central, 
 
 283 
 Stock-jobbery in France, 192 
 Strike, Chartist scheme of a 
 
 general, 180 
 Surplus-value, 259 
 
 Thirty Years' War in 
 
 Germany, 109 
 Town, growth of independence 
 
 of the mediaeval, 73-75 
 
 Towns in the future, life in, 
 
 313-16 
 Trade, recurring depressions in, 
 
 169, 272, 273 
 Trades-Unions, rise of the, 167 
 Tribe, the, 25, 26 
 
 Unemployed, the, 272, 273 
 Unions, growth of Trades-, 167 
 Upper classes, adjunct to the 
 
 middle classes, 173 
 Usurer, growth of the, 101 
 Usury found in early civilisa- 
 tions, 41 
 
 „ not condemned by the 
 Jesuits 99 
 Utopists, the, 206-17 
 
 Value, surplus-, 259 
 
 „ exchange, 233 
 Variable capital, 255-58 
 Versemakers in France before 
 
 the Revolution, 131 
 
 Wars, religious, 108, 109 
 Woman, her present economic 
 dependence, 299 
 „ under Socialism, 299, 
 300 
 World-market, England drawn 
 into the, 91, 92 
 ,, the formation of 
 
 a, 89 
 
 rrinledby R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh. 
 
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