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A HISTOHY OF SOCIALISM 
 
HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS KIKKUP 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH 
 ADAM AND CHAKLES BLACK 
 
 J892 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The aim of the present book is two-fold ; to set forth 
 the leading phased of the historic socialism ; and to 
 attempt a criticism and interpretation of the move- 
 ment as a whole. 
 
 It has appeared to the writeit-that a presentment of 
 the main features of the development of socialism might 
 be of service in the discussion and consideration of the 
 vexed questions of the time. I have made it no part of 
 my plan to give details, which in fact are generally 
 neither interesting nor valuable. Eeaders desirous of 
 detail must be referred to the writings of the varioijs 
 socialists or to works that treat of special phases of the 
 movement. Yet I hope that the statement of the lead- 
 ing theories is sufficiently clear and adequate to enable 
 the reader to form his own judgment of the highly 
 controversial matters involved in the history of socialism. 
 I may add that in every case my account is drawn from 
 an extensive study of the sources. 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 But the purely historical part of such a work is far 
 from being the most difficult. The real difficulty begins 
 when we attempt to form a clear conception of the 
 meaning and significance of the socialistic movement, 
 to indicate its place in history, and the issues to which 
 it is tending. In the concluding chapters I have made 
 such an attempt, with full consciousness of the risks 
 incurred. The good reader who takes the trouble to go 
 so far through this book can accept my contribution to 
 a hai'd problem for what it is worth. He may feel 
 assured that it is offered with the best intentions. 
 
 To all thoughtful and discerning men it should now 
 be clear that the solution of the social question is the 
 great task which has been laid upon the present epoch 
 in the history of the world. It is almost too great a 
 reward for any man to have rendered any substantial 
 service in the working of it out ; and to have utterly 
 failed is no disgrace. In such a cause it is an honour 
 even to have done efficient work as a navvy or hodman. 
 
 It remains only to explain that material contributed 
 to the " Encyclopaedia Britannica " has been utilised 
 for some portions of this volume ; and I beg to thank 
 the publishers for permission to do so. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAl". p^(.g 
 
 I. INTEODUCTION I 
 
 11. EAELY FRENCH SOCIALISM 19 
 
 SAINT-SIMON ig 
 
 FOUBIEE 28 
 
 •III, FEENCH SOCIAIilSM OF 184S . . . . . 38 
 LOUIS BLANC . .... .40 
 
 PEOUDIION 48 
 
 IV. EAELT ENGLISH SOCIALISM 55 
 
 V. FEEDINAND LASSALLE 69 
 
 I. LIFE . . 69 
 
 II. THEOEIES go 
 
 VI. EODBBETUS II7 
 
 VII. KAEL MAEX I24 
 
 Vlll. THE INTEENATIONAL 1 55 
 
 IX. ANAECHISM 183 
 
 X. THE PUEIFIED SOCIALISM 2l6 
 
 XL SOCIALISM AND THE EVOLUTION THEOEV . . . 236 
 XII. EECENT PEOGEESS OF SOCIALISM . . . .253 
 
 APPENDIX 288 
 
 INDEX • • 296 
 
A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The word ' socialism ' is of comparatively recent origin, 
 having been coined in England in 1835. In that year 
 a society, which received the grandiloquent name of the 
 Association of all Classes of all Nations, was founded 
 under the auspices of Eobert Owen; and the words 
 socialist and socialism were first used during the 
 discussions which arose in connection with it.* As 
 Owen and his school had no esteem for the political 
 reform of the time, and laid all emphasis on the neces- 
 sity of social improvement and reconstruction, it is 
 obvious how the name came to be recognised as suitable 
 and distinctive. The term was soon afterwards borrowed 
 from England by a distinguished French writer, Eeybaud, 
 in his well-known work the Mformatews modernes, in 
 which he discussed the theories of Saint-Simon, Fourier, 
 and Owen. Through Eeybaud it soon gained wide 
 currency on the Continent, and is now the accepted 
 world-historic name for one of the most remarkable 
 movements of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Holyoake, History of Co-operation, vol. i. p. 210, ed. 1875. 
 
 /(. 
 
 I 
 
2 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 The name was thus first applied in England to Owen's 
 theory of social reconstruction, and in Prance to those 
 also of Saint-Simon and Fourier. The best usage has 
 always connected it with the views of these men, and with 
 the cognate opinions which have since appeared. But 
 the word is used with a great variety of meaning, not 
 only in popular speech and by politicians, but even by 
 economists and learned critics of socialism. There is a 
 growing tendency to regard as socialistic any interfer- 
 ence with property undertaken by society on behalf of 
 the poor, the limitation of the principle of laissez-faire 
 in favour of the suffering classes, radical social reform 
 which disturbs the present system of private property 
 as regulated by free competition. It is probable enough 
 that the word will be permanently used to express the 
 change in practice and opinion indicated by these 
 phrases, as a general name for the strong reaction that 
 has now set in against the overstrained individualism 
 and one-sided freedom which date from the end of the 
 eighteenth century. The application is neither precise 
 nor accurate ; but it is use and wont that determine the 
 meaning of words, and this seems to be the tendency of 
 use and wont. 
 
 Even economic writers differ greatly in the meaning 
 they attach to the word. As socialism has been most 
 powerful and most studied on the Continent, it may be 
 interesting to compare the definitions given by some 
 leading French and German economists. The great 
 German economist Eoscher defines it' as including 
 'those tendencies which demand a greater regard 
 for the common weal than consists with human 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 nature.' * Adolf Held says that ' we may define as social- 
 istic every tendency which demands the subordination of 
 the individual will to the community.' f Janet more 
 precisely defines it as follows : — ' We call socialism every 
 doctrine which teaches that the State has a right to cor- 
 rect the inequality of wealth which exists among men, and 
 to legally establish the balance by taking from those who 
 have too much in order to give to those who have not 
 enough, and that in a permanent manner, and not in 
 such and such a particular case — a famine, for instance, 
 a public calamity, etc' J Laveleye explains it thus : 
 ' In the first place, every socialistic doctrine aims at 
 introducing greater equality in social conditions ; and in 
 the second place, at realising those reforms by the law 
 or the State.' § Von Scheel simply defines it as the 
 ' economic philosophy of the suffering classes.' || 
 
 Of all these definitions it can only be said that they 
 more or less faithfully reflect current opinion as to the 
 nature of socialism. They are either too vagae or they 
 are misleading, and they quite fail to bring out the clear 
 and strongly marked characteristics that distinguish the 
 phenomena to which the name of socialism is properly 
 applied. To say that socialism exacts a greater regard 
 for the common weal than is compatible with human 
 nature is to pass sentence on the movement, not to 
 define it. In all ages of the world, and under all forms 
 
 * Quoted by Adolf Held, SozicMsnms, Sozialdemohratie, und Sozidl 
 Politih, p. 30. 
 t Ibid. p. 29. 
 
 t Leu Originea du Sodalisme Oontemporain, p. 67. 
 § Le Sodalisme Contemporain, p. iv. 
 II Schonbeig's Handbiich der Pol Oekonomie, a-it. 'Socialism.' 
 
Missing Page 
 
Missing Page 
 
6 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 individuals freely struggling for increase of wealth) 
 leads inevitably to social and economic anarchy, to the 
 degradation of the working man and his family, to the 
 growth of vice and idleness among the wealthy classes 
 and their dependents, to bad and inartistic workman- 
 ship, to insecurity, waste, and starvation ; and that it is 
 tending more and more to separate society into two 
 classes, wealthy millionaires confronted with an enor- 
 mous mass of proletarians, the issue out of which must 
 either be socialism or social ruin. To avoid all these 
 evils and to secure a more equitable distribution of the 
 means and appliances of happiness, socialisty propose 
 that land and capital, which are the requisites of labour 
 and the sources of all wealth and culture, should be 
 placed under social ownership and control. 
 
 In thus maintaining that society should assume the 
 management of industry and secure an equitable distri- 
 bution of its fruits, socialists are agreed ; but on the 
 most important points of detail they difPer very greatly. 
 They differ as to the form society will take in carrying 
 out the socialist programme, as to the relation of local 
 bodies to the central government, and whether there is 
 to be any central government, or any government at all 
 in the ordinary sense of the word, as to the influence of 
 the national idea in the society of the future, etc. They 
 differ also as to what should be regarded as an ' equitable ' 
 system of distribution. The school of Saint-Simon ad- 
 vocated a social hierarchy, in which every man should 
 be placed according to his capacity and rewarded 
 according to his works. In the communities of Fourier 
 the miaimum of subsistence was to be guaranteed to 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 each out of the common gain, the remainder to be 
 divided between labour, capital, and talent — five- 
 twelfths going to the first, four-twelfths to the second, 
 and three-twelfths to the third. At the revolution of 
 1848 Louis Blanc proposed that remuneration should be 
 equal for all members of his social workshops. In the 
 programme drawn up by the united social democrats of 
 Germany (Gotha, 1875) it is provided that all shall 
 enjoy the results of labour according to their reasonable 
 wants, all of course being bound to work. 
 
 It is needless to say also that the theories of socialism 
 have been held in connection with the most varying 
 opinions in philosophy and religion. A great deal of 
 the historic socialism has been regarded as a necessary 
 implicate of idealism. The prevailing socialism of the 
 day is in large part based on the frankest and most out- 
 spoken revolutionary materialism. On the other hand, 
 many socialists hold that their system is a necessary out- 
 come of Christianity, that socialism and Christianity are 
 essential the one to the other ; aud it should be said 
 that the ethics of socialism are closely akin to the ethics 
 of Christianity, if not identical with them. 
 
 Still, it should be insisted that the basis of socialism 
 is economic, involving a fundamental change in the 
 relation of labour to land and capital — a change which 
 will largely affect production, and will entirely revolu- 
 tionise the existing system of distribution. But, while 
 its basis is economic, socialism implies and carries with 
 it a change in the political, ethical, technical, and 
 artistic arrangements and institutions of society, which 
 would constitute a revolution greater than has ever 
 
8 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 taken place in human history, greater than the transi- 
 tion from the ancient to the mediaeval world, or from 
 the latter to the existing order of society. 
 
 In the first place, such a change generally assumes 
 as its political complement the most thoroughly demo- 
 cratic organisation of society. The early socialism of 
 Owen and Saint-Simon was marked by not a little of 
 the autocratic spirit ; but the tendency of the present 
 socialism is more and more to ally itself with the most 
 advanced democracy. Socialism, in fact, claims to be 
 the economic complement of democracy, maintaining 
 that without a fundamental economic change political 
 privilege has neither meaning nor value. 
 
 In the second place, socialism naturally goes with an 
 unselfish or altruistic system of ethics. The most 
 characteristic feature of the old societies was the ex- 
 ploitation of the weak by the strong under the systems 
 of slavery, serfdom, and wage-labour. Under the 
 socialistic regime it is the privilege and duty of the 
 strong and talented to use their superior force and 
 richer endowments in the service of their fellow-men 
 without distinction of class, or nation, or creed. What- 
 ever our opinion may be of the wisdom or practica- 
 bility of their theories, history proves that socialists 
 have been ready to sacrifice wealth, social posi- 
 tion, and life itself, for the cause which they have 
 adopted. 
 
 In the third place, socialists maintain that, under 
 their system and no other, can the highest excellence 
 and beauty be realised in industrial production and in 
 art ; whereas under the present system beauty and 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 thoroughness are alike sacrificed to cheapness, which is 
 a necessity of successful competition. 
 
 Lastly, the socialists refuse to admit that individual 
 happiness or freedom or character would be sacrificed 
 under the social arrangements they propose. They 
 believe that under the present system a free and har- 
 monious development of individual capacity and happi- 
 ness is possible only for the privileged minority, and 
 that socialism alone can open up a fair opportunity for 
 all. They believe, in short, that there is no opposition 
 whatever between socialism and individuality rightly 
 understood, that these two are complements the one of 
 the other, that in socialism alone may every individual 
 have hope of free development and a full realisation of 
 himself. 
 
 Having shown how wide a social revolution is implied 
 in the socialistic scheme of reconstruction, we may now 
 state (i) that the economic basis of the prevalent 
 socialism is a collectivism which excludes private pos- 
 session of capital, and places it under social ownership 
 in some form or other. In the words of Schaffle, ' the 
 Alpha and Omega of socialism is the transformation of 
 private competing capitals into a united collective 
 capital.'* A. Wagner's more elaborate definition of 
 it t is entirely in agreement with that of Schaffle. 
 Such a system, while insisting on collective capital, is 
 quite consistent with private property in other forms, 
 and with perfect freedom in the use of one's own share 
 in the equitable distribution of the produce of the 
 
 * Quintessenz des Socialiamus, p. 12. 
 
 t Lehrbueh der Pol. Oekonomie, Orundlegvmy , p. 174. 
 
10 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 associated labour. A thoroughgoing socialism demands 
 that this principle should be applied to the capital and 
 production of the whole world ; only then can it attain 
 to supreme and perfect realisation. But a sober-minded 
 socialism will admit that the various intermediate 
 stages in which the principle finds a partial application 
 are so far a true and real development of the socialistic 
 idea. Even the best definitions, however, are only of 
 secondary importance ; and while we believe that they 
 give an accurate account of the prevailing socialism, 
 they are arbitrary, abstract, and otherwise open to objec- 
 tion. As we have already seen, the system of Fourier 
 admitted of private capital under social control. The 
 absolute views of the subject now current are due to 
 the excessive love of system characteristic of German 
 thought, and are not consistent either with history or 
 human nature. 
 
 (2) Socialism is both a theory of social evolution 
 and a working force in the history of the nineteenth 
 century. The teaching of some eminent socialists, 
 such as Eodbertus, may be regarded as a prophecy 
 concerning the social development of the future rather 
 than as a subject of agitation. In their view socialism 
 is the next stage in the evolution of society, destined 
 after many generations to supersede capitalism, as 
 capitalism displaced feudalism, and feudalism succeeded 
 to slavery. Even the majority of the most active 
 socialists consider the question as still in the stage of 
 agitation and propaganda, their present task being 
 that of enlightening the masses until the consumma- 
 tion of the present social development, and the declared 
 
INTRODUCTION ii 
 
 bankruptcy of the present social order, shall have 
 delivered the world into their hands. Socialism, there- 
 fore, is for the most part a theory affecting the future, 
 more or less remote, and has only to a limited degree 
 gained a real and" practical footing in the life of our 
 time. Yet it should not be forgotten that its doctrines 
 have most powerfully affected all the ablest recent eco- 
 nomic writers of Germany, and have even considerably 
 modified German legislation. Its influence is rapidly 
 growing among the lower and also among the most 
 advanced classes in almost every country dominated by 
 European culture, following as a destroying negation 
 the development of capitalism. 
 
 (3) In its doctrinar aspects socialism is most inter- 
 esting as a criticism of the present economic order, of 
 what socialists call the capitalistic system, with which 
 the existing land system is connected. Under the present 
 economic order land and capital (the material and instru- 
 ments without which industry is impossible) are the 
 property of a class employing a class of wage-labourers 
 handicapped by their exclusion from land and capital. 
 Competition is the general rule by which the share of the 
 members of those classes in the fruits of production is 
 determined. Against this system critical socialism is a 
 reasoned protest ; and it is at issue also with the pre- 
 vailing political economy, in so far as it assumes or 
 maintains the permanence or righteousness of this 
 economic order. Of the economic optimism implied in 
 the historic doctrine of laissez-faire socialism is an un- 
 compromising rejection. 
 
 (4) Socialism is usually regarded as a phase of the 
 
12 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 struggle for the emancipation of labour, for the com- 
 plete participation of the working classes in the mate- 
 rial, intellectual, and spiritual inheritance of the human 
 race. This is certainly the most substantial and most 
 prominent part of the socialist programme, the working 
 classes being the most numerous and the worst sufferers 
 from the present regime. This view, however, is rather 
 one-sided, for socialism claims not less to be in the 
 interest of the small capitalist gradually crushed by the 
 competition of the larger, and in the interest also of the 
 large capitalist, whose position is endangered by the 
 huge unmanageableuess of his success, and by the 
 world-wide economic anarchy from which even the 
 greatest are not secure. Still, it is the deliverance of 
 the working class that stands in the front of every 
 socialistic theory ; and, though the initiative in socialist 
 speculation and action has usually come from men be- 
 longing to the middle and upper classes, yet it is to the 
 workmen that they generally appeal. 
 
 While recognising the great confusion in the use of 
 the word ' socialism,' we have treated it as properly a 
 phenomenon of the nineteenth century, beginning 
 in Prance with Saint-Simon and Fourier, in England 
 with Eobert Owen, and most powerfully represented at 
 the present day by the school of Karl Marx, As we have 
 seen, however, there are definitions of the word which 
 would give it a wider range of meaning and a more 
 ancient beginning, compared with which capitalism is 
 but of yesterday ; which would, in fact, make it as old 
 as human society itself. In the early stages of human 
 development, when the tribe or the village community 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 was the social unit, the subordination of the individual 
 to the society in which he dwelt was the rule, and 
 common property was the prevalent form. In the 
 development of the idea of property, especially as re-, 
 gards land, three successive historical stages are broadly 
 recognised — common property and common enjoyment 
 of it, common property and private enjoyment, private 
 property and private enjoyment. The last form did not 
 attain to full expression till the end of the eighteenth 
 century, when the principle of individual freedom, 
 which was really a reaction against privileged restric- 
 tion, was proclaimed as a positive axiom of government 
 and of economics. The free individual struggle for 
 wealth, a.nd for the social advantages dependent on 
 wealth, is a comparatively recent thing. 
 
 At all periods of history the State reserved to itself 
 the right to interpose in the arrangements of property 
 — sometimes in favour of the poor, as in the case of the 
 English poor law, which may thus be regarded as a 
 socialistic measure. Moreover, all through history revolts 
 in favour of the rearrangement of property have been 
 very frequent. Prom the beginning there have existed 
 misery and discontent, the contemplation of which has 
 called forth schemes of an ideal society in the noblest 
 and most sympathetic minds. Of those are the Utopias 
 of Plato and Thomas More, advocating a systematic 
 communism. And in the societies of the Catholic 
 Church we have a permanent example of common 
 property and a common enjoyment of it. 
 
 How are we to distinguish the socialism of the nine- 
 teenth century from these old-world phenomena, and 
 
14 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 especially from the communism which has played so great 
 a part in history ? To this query it is not difficult to give 
 a clear and precise answer from the socialist point of view. 
 Socialism is a stage in the evolution of society which 
 could not arrive till the conditions necessary to it had 
 been established. Of these, one most essential con- 
 dition was the development of the great industrialism 
 which, after a long period of preparation and gradual 
 growth, began to reach its culminating point with the 
 inventions and technical improvements, with the appli- 
 cation of steam and the rise of the factory system, in 
 England towards the end of the eighteenth century. 
 Under this system industry was organised into a vast 
 social operation, and was thus already so far socialised ; 
 but it was a system that was exploited by the individual 
 owner of the capital at his own pleasure and for his 
 own behoof. Under the pressure of the competition of 
 the large industry, the small capitalist is gradually 
 crushed out, and the working producers become wage- 
 labourers organised and drilled in immense factories 
 and workshops. The development of this system still 
 continues and is enveloping the whole world. Such is 
 the industrial revolution. 
 
 Parallel with this a revolution in the world of ideas, 
 equally great and equally necessary to the rise of social- 
 ism, has taken place. This change of thought, which 
 made its world-historic announcement in the French 
 Eevolution, made reason the supreme judge and had 
 freedom for its great practical watchword. It was 
 represented in the economic sphere by the school of 
 Adam Smith, Socialism was an outcome of it too, 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 and first of all in Saint-Simon and his school pro- 
 fessed to give the positive and constructive corrective 
 to a negative movement which did not see that it was 
 merely negative and therefore temporary. In other 
 words, Saint-Simon may be said to aim at nothing less 
 than the completion of the work of Voltaire, Eousseau, 
 and Adam Smith, 
 
 Thus socialism professes to be the legitimate child of 
 two great revolutions, — of the industrial revolution 
 which began to establish itself in England towards the 
 end of the eighteenth century, and of the parallel revo- 
 lution in thought which about the same time found 
 most prominent expression in France. Robert Owen 
 worked chiefly under the influence of the former ; 
 Saint-Simon and Fourier grew up under the latter. 
 The conspiracy of Babeuf is properly to be regarded 
 as a crude revolutionary communism not essentially 
 different from the rude efforts in communism made in 
 earlier periods of history. With Saint-Simon and Owen 
 bistoric socialism really begins, and is no longer an 
 isolated fact, but has had a continuous and widening 
 development, the succession of socialistic teaching and 
 propaganda being taken up by one country after 
 another throughout the civilised world. 
 
 We have seen, then, that the rise of socialism as a 
 new and reasoned theory of society was relative to the 
 industrial revolution and to the ideas proclaimed in the 
 French Revolution, prominent among which, besides the 
 much emphasised idea of freedom and the less easily 
 realised ideals of equality and fraternity, was the 
 conception of the worth and dignity of labour. Though 
 
i6 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Owen was most largely influenced by the former and 
 Saint-Simon and Fourier by the latter, it is certain that 
 all three were greatly affected by both the new move- 
 ments. The motive power in Owen's career was the 
 philanthropy and humanitarianism of the eighteenth 
 century. He had grown up in the midst of the in- 
 dustrial revolution ; he was one of the most successful 
 pioneers in the improvement of the cotton manufacture. 
 No one could be more deeply conscious of the enormous 
 abuses of the factory system ; and no one better knew 
 the wonderful services that might be rendered by techni- 
 cal improvement if only it were made subordinate to 
 human well-being. In the ' career of Owen we see 
 the new spirit of the eighteenth century seeking to 
 bring the mechanism of the new industrial system 
 under the direction of a nobler principle, in which the 
 good of all should be the great and sole aim. 
 
 The position of Saint-Simon was considerably differ- 
 ent, yet akin. As Owen had before his eyes the evils 
 of a young but gigantic industrialism, Saint-Simon 
 contemplated the hoary abuses of an idle and privileged 
 feudalism, fearfully shaken no doubt by the Revolution, 
 but still strong in Europe, and in France as elsewhere 
 powerfully revived during the period after "Waterloo. 
 Saint-Simon saw that a new world, an industrial world 
 resting on labour, had arisen, while the old feudal and 
 theological world — fainAaTvt courtiers and a clergy 
 steeped in ignorance — still ruled. All this array of 
 parasites, who had no longer any useful function to per- 
 form for society, Saint-Simon sought to replace by the 
 ndustrial chiefs and scientific leaders as the real work- 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 iag heads of the French people. Only, he expected 
 that these exceptionally gifted men, instead of exploit- 
 ing the labour of others, should control an industrial 
 France for the general good. 
 
 Neither Owen nor Saint-Simon was revolutionary in 
 the ordinary sense. Owen was most anxious that the 
 English and other Governments should adopt his pro- 
 jects of socialistic reform. Leading statesmen and 
 royal personages befriended him. He had no faith in 
 the political reforms of 1832 ; he reckoned the political 
 side of chartism as of no account, and he preferred 
 socialistic experiment under autocratic guidance until 
 the workmen should be trained to rule themselves. 
 The same autocratic tendency was very pronounced in 
 Saint-Simon and his school. His first appeal was to 
 Louis XVIII. He wished to supersede the feudal aris- 
 tocracy by a working aristocracy of merit. His school 
 claim to have been the first to warn the Governments 
 of Europe of the rise of revolutionary socialism. In 
 short, the early socialism arose during the reaction con- 
 sequent on the wars of the French Revolution, and was 
 influenced by the political tendencies of the time. 
 
 The beginning of socialism may be dated from 18 17, 
 the year when Owen laid his scheme for a socialistic 
 community before the committee of the House of Com- 
 mons on the poor law, the year also that the specu- 
 lations of Saint-Simon definitely took a socialistic 
 direction. The outlines of the history of socialism are 
 very simple. Till 1850 there was a double movement 
 in France and England. In the former country, after 
 Saint-Simon and Fourier the movement was represented 
 
i8 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 chiefly by Proudhon and Louis Blanc. In England, 
 ajpfcer Owen the movement was taken up by the body 
 of Christian socialists associated with Maurice and 
 Kingsley. The more recent socialism is due chiefly to 
 German and also Russian thinkers, but is generally in- 
 ternational both in its principles and sympathies. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 early french socialism 
 
 Saint-Simon 
 
 The founders of the early socialism grew up under the 
 influence of the too-confident optimism, which charac- 
 terised the early stages of the French Revolution of 
 1 789. They had an excessive faith in the possibilities of 
 human progress and perfectibility ; they kneW little of 
 the true laws of social evolution — in fact, did not suffix 
 ciently recognise thoSe aspects of life which Darwin- 
 ism has brought out so clearly. These faults the early 
 socialists shared with many other thinkers of the time 
 in which they lived. 
 
 Oomte Henri de Saint-Simon, the founder of French 
 socialism, was born at Paris in 1760. He belonged to a 
 younger branch of the family of the celebrated duke 
 of that name. His education, he tells us, was directed 
 by D'Alembert. At the age of nineteen he went as 
 volunteer to assist the American colonies in their 
 revolt against Britain. 
 
 From his youth Saint-Simon felt the promptings of 
 an eager ambition. His valet had orders to awake him 
 every morning with the words, ' Remember, monsieur 
 
50 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 le comte, that you have great things to do ' ; and his 
 ancestor Charlemagne appeared to him in a dream, fore- 
 telling a remarkable future for him. Among his early 
 schemes was one to unite the Atlantic and the Pacific 
 by a canal, and another to construct a canal from 
 Madrid to the sea. 
 
 He took no part of any importance in the French 
 Eevolution, but amassed a little fortune by land specu- 
 lation — not on his own account, however, as he said, 
 but to facilitate his future projects. Accordingly, when 
 he was nearly forty years of age he went through a 
 varied course of study and experiment, in order to en- 
 large and clarify his view of things. One of these 
 experiments was an unhappy marriage, which after a 
 year's duration was dissolved by the mutual consent of 
 the parties. Another result of his experiments was 
 that he found himself completely impoverished, and 
 lived in penury for the remainder of his life. 
 
 The first of his numerous writings, Lettres d'un 
 HabitaTut de Geneve, appeared in 1803; but his early 
 works were mostly scientific and political. It was 
 not till 1817 that he began, in a treatise entitled 
 Z'lTidustrie, to propound his socialistic views, which he 
 further developed in Z'Organisateur (1819), Du SysUme 
 indvstriel (1821), Oatechisme des Industriels (1823). 
 The last and most important expression of his views is 
 the Nouveau Christianisme (1825). 
 
 For many years before his death in 1825 Saint-Simon 
 had been reduced to the greatest straits. He was 
 obliged to accept a laborious post for a salary of :£'40 a 
 year, to live on the generosity of a former valet, and 
 
EARLY FRENCH SOCIALISM 21 
 
 finally to solicit a small pension from his family. In 
 1823 he attempted suicide in despair. It was not till 
 very late in his career that he attached to himself a few- 
 ardent disciples. 
 
 As a thinker Saint-Simon was entirely deficient in 
 system, clearness, and consecutive strength. His writ- 
 ings are largely made up of a few ideas continually 
 repeated. But his speculations are always ingenioaa 
 and original; and he has unquestionably exercised 
 great influence on modem thought, both as the historic 
 founder of French socialism and as suggesting much of 
 what was afterwards elaborated into Oomtism. 
 
 Apart from the details of his socialistic teaching, 
 with which we need not concern ourselves, we find 
 that the ideas of Saint-Simon with regard to the 
 reconstruction of society are very simple. His opinions 
 were conditioned by the French Eevolution and by the 
 feudal and military system still prevalent in France. 
 In opposition to the destructive liberalism of the Revo-' 
 lution he insisted on the necessity of a new and positive 
 re-organisation of society. So far was he from advocat- 
 ing social revolt that he appealed to Louis XVIII. to 
 inaugurate the new order of things. In opposition, 
 however, to the feudal and military system, the former 
 aspect of which had been strengthened by the Restora- 
 tion, he advocated an arrangement by which the indus- 
 trial chiefs should control society. In place of the 
 Mediaeval Church, the spiritual direction of society should 
 fall to the men of science. What Saint-Simon desired, 
 therefore, was an industrialist State directed by modem 
 science. The men who are best fitted to organise 
 
22 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 society for productive labour are entitled to bear rule 
 in it. 
 
 The social aim is to produce things useful to life ; 
 the final end of social activity is ' the exploitation of 
 the globe by association.' The contrast between labour 
 and capital, so much emphasised by later socialism, is 
 not present to Saint-Simon, but it is assumed that the 
 industrial chiefs, to whom the control of production is 
 to be committed, shall rule in the interest of society. 
 Later on, the cause of the poor receives greater atten- 
 tion, till in his greatest work, The New Christianity, it 
 becomes the central point of his teaching, and takes the 
 form of a religion. It was this religious development 
 of his teaching that occasioned his final quarrel with 
 Comte. 
 
 Previous to the publication of the Nouveau Chris- 
 tianisme Saint-Simon had not concerned himself with 
 theology. Here he starts from a belief in God, and his 
 object in the treatise is to reduce Christianity to its 
 simple and essential elements. He does this by clear- 
 ing it of the dogmas and other excrescences and defects 
 that have gathered round both the Catholic and Pro- 
 testant forms of it, which he subjects to a searching and 
 ingenious criticism. The moral doctrine will by the 
 new faith be considered the most important ; the divine 
 element in Christianity is contained in the precept that 
 men should act towards one another as brethren. ' The 
 new Christian organisation will deduce the temporal 
 institutions as well as the spiritual from the principle 
 that all men should act towards one another as bre- 
 thren.' Expressing the same idea in modern language, 
 
EARLY FRENCH SOCIALISM 23 
 
 Saint-Simon propounds as the comprehensive formula 
 of the new Christianity this precept: 'The whole of 
 society ought to strive towards the amelioration of the 
 moral and physical existence of the poorest class ; 
 society ought to organise itself in the way best adapted 
 for attaining this end.' This principle became the 
 watchword of the entire school of Saint-Simon; for 
 t|iem it was alike the essence of religion and the pro- 
 gramme of social reform. 
 
 During his lifetime the views of Saint-Simon had 
 little influence, and he left only a very few devoted 
 disciples, who continued to advocate the doctrines of 
 their master, whom they revered as a prophet. An 
 important departure was made in 1828 by Bazard, who 
 gave a ' complete exposition of the Saint-Simonian 
 faith ' in a long course of lectures in the Eue Taranne 
 at Paris. In 1830 Bazard and Bnfantin were acknow- 
 ledged as the heads of the school ; and the fermentation 
 caused by the revolution of July of the same year 
 brought the whole movement prominently before the 
 attention of France. Early next year the school ob- 
 tained possession of the Globe through Pierre Leroux, 
 who had joined the school, which now numbered some 
 of the ablest and most promising young men of France, 
 many of the pupils of the ficole Polytechnique having 
 caught its enthusiasm. The members formed themselves 
 into an association arranged in three grades, and consti- 
 tuting a society or family, which lived out of a common 
 purse in the Rue Monsigny. 
 
 Before long, however, dissensions began to arise in 
 the sect. Bazard, a man of logical and more solid 
 
24 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 temperament, could no longer work in harmony with 
 Enfantin, who desired to establish an arrogant and 
 fantastic sacerdotalism, with lax notions as to marriage 
 and the relations of the sexes. After a time Bazard 
 seceded, and many of the strongest supporters followed 
 his example. A series of extravagant entertainments 
 given by the society during the winter of 1832 reduced 
 its financial resources and greatly discredited it in 
 character. They finally removed to Menilmontant, to 
 a property of Enfantin, where they lived in a com- 
 munistic society, distinguished by a peculiar dress. 
 Shortly afterwards the chiefs were tried and condemned 
 for proceedings prejudicial to the social order ; and the 
 sect was entirely broken up in 1832. Many of its 
 members became famous as engineers, economists, and 
 men of business. The idea of constructing the Suez 
 Canal, as carried out by Lesseps, proceeded from the 
 school. 
 
 In the school of Saint-Simon we find a great advance 
 both in the breadth and firmness with which the vague 
 and confused views of the master are developed ; and 
 this progress is due chiefly to Bazard. In the philo- 
 sophy of history they recognise epochs of two kinds, 
 the critical or negative, and the organic or constructive. 
 The former, in which philosophy is the dominating 
 force, is characterised by war, egotism, and anarchy; 
 the latter, which is controlled by religion, is marked by 
 the spirit of obedience, devotion, association. The 
 two spirits of antagonism and association are the two 
 great social principles, and on the degree of prevalence 
 of the two depends the character of an epoch. The 
 
EARLY FRENCH SOCIALISM 25 
 
 spirit of association, however, tends more and more to 
 prevail over its opponent, extending from the family to 
 the city, from the city to the nation, and from the 
 nation to the federation. This principle of association 
 is to be the keynote of the social development of the 
 future. Hitherto the law of humanity has been the 
 ' exploitation of man by man ' in its three stages — 
 slavery, serfdom, the proletariat; in the future the 
 aim must be ' the exploitation of the globe by man 
 associated to man.' 
 
 Under the present system the industrial chief still 
 exploits the proletariat, the members of which, though 
 nominally free, must accept his terms under pain of 
 starvation. This state of things is consolidated by the 
 law of inheritance, whereby the instruments of produc- 
 tion, which are private property, and all the attendant 
 social advantages, are transmitted without regard to 
 personal merit. The social disadvantages being also 
 transmitted, misery becomes hereditary. The only 
 remedy for this is the abolition of the law of in- 
 heritance, and the union of all the instruments of 
 labour in a social fund, which shall be exploited by 
 association. Society thus becomes sole proprietor, 
 intrusting to social groups or social functionaries the 
 management of the various properties. The right of 
 succession is transferred from the family to the 
 State. 
 
 The school of Saint-Simon insists strongly on the 
 claims of merit ; they advocate a social hierarchy in 
 which each man shall be placed according to his 
 capacity and rewarded according to his works. This 
 
26 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 is, indeed, a most special and pronounced feature of 
 the Saint-Simon Socialism, whose theory of govern- 
 ment is a kind of spiritual or scientific autocracy, 
 culminating in the fantastic sacerdotalism of Bnfantin. 
 
 With regard to the family and the relation of the 
 sexes the school of Saint-Simon advocated the complete 
 emancipation of woman and her entire equality with 
 man. The ' social individual ' is man and woman, who 
 are associated in the triple function of religion, the 
 State, and the family. In its official declarations the 
 school maintained the sanctity of the Christian law of 
 marriage. On this point Enfantin fell into a prurient 
 and fantastic latitudinarianism, which made the school 
 a scandal to Prance, but many of the most prominent 
 members besides Bazard refused to follow him. 
 
 Connected with the last-mentioned doctrines was 
 their famous theory of the ' rehabilitation of the flesh,' 
 deduced from the philosophic theory of the school, 
 which was a species of Pantheism, though they re- 
 pudiated the name. On this theory they rejected the 
 dualism so much emphasised by Catholic Christianity 
 in its penances and mortifications, and held that the 
 body should be restored to its due place of honour. It 
 is a vague principle, of which the ethical character 
 depends on the interpretation ; and it was variously 
 interpreted in the school of Saint-Siraon. It was 
 certainly immoral as held by Enfantin, by whom it 
 was developed into a kind of sensual mysticism, a 
 system of free love with a religious sanction.* 
 
 * An excellent edition of the works of Saint-Simon and Enfantin 
 was begun by survivors of the sect in (Paris) 1865, and now numbers 
 
EARLY FRENCH SOCIALISM 27 
 
 The good and bad aspects of the Saint-Simon 
 •socialism are too obvious to require elucidation. The 
 antagonism between the old economic order and the 
 new had only begun to declare itself. The extent and 
 violence of the disease were not yet apparent; both 
 diagnosis and remedy were superficial and premature. 
 Such deep-seated organic disorder was not to be con- 
 jured away by the waving of a magic wand. The 
 movement was all too Utopian and extravagant in much 
 of its activity. The most prominent portion of the 
 school attacked social order in its essential point — 
 the family morality — adopting the worst features of 
 a fantastic, arrogant, and prurient sacerdotalism, and 
 parading them in the face of Europe. Thus it 
 happened that a school which . attracted so many of 
 the most brilliant and promising young men of Prance, 
 which was so striking and original in its criticism of 
 the existing condition of things, which was so strong in 
 the spirit of initiative, and was in many ways so noble, 
 unselfish, and aspiring, sank amidst the laughter and 
 indignation of a scandalised society. 
 
 forty vols. See Eeybaud, Mudes sur les B6formatev/rs modernes 
 (7th edition, Paris, 1864) ; Janet, Saint-Simon et le Saint- Simonisme 
 (Paris, 1878) ; A. J. Booth, Saint-Simon and Saint- Simonism (London, 
 1871). 
 
28 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Fourier 
 
 Considered as a purely literary and speculative pro- 
 duct, the socialism of Fourier was prior to those both 
 of Owen and Saint-Simon. Fourier's first work, 
 Thiorie des Quatre Movements, was published as early as 
 1808. His system, however, scarcely attracted any 
 attention and exercised no influence till the movements 
 originated by Owen and Saint-Simon had begun to 
 decline. 
 
 The socialism of Fourier is in many respects funda- 
 mentally different from that of Saint-Simon; in the 
 two schools, in fact, we find the two opposing types of 
 socialism which have continued to prevail ever since. 
 Saint-Sim onism represented the principle of authority, 
 of centralisation ; while Fourier made all possible pro- 
 vision for local and individual freedom. With Saint- 
 Simonism the State is the starting-point, the normal 
 and dominant power ; in Fourier the like position is 
 held by a local body, corresponding to the commune, 
 which he called the Phalange. In the system of 
 Fourier the phalange holds the supreme and central 
 place, other organisation in comparison with it being 
 secondary and subordinate. 
 
 The deviser of the phalange, Fran9ois Marie Charles 
 Fourier * was a very remarkable man. He was born at 
 
 * Fourier's complete works (6 vols., Paris, 1840-46 ; new ed. 
 1870). The most eminent expounder of Fourierism was Victor 
 , Consid^rant, Destinie Soeiale ; Gatti de Gammont's Fourier et son 
 SysUrm is an exceUeut summary. 
 
EARLY FRENCH SOCIALISM 29 
 
 Besan9on in 1772, and received from his father, a 
 prosperous draper, an excellent education at the academy 
 of his native town. The boy excelled in the studies of 
 the school, and regretfully abandoned them for a busi- 
 ness career, which he followed in various towns of 
 France. As a commercial traveller in Holland and 
 Germany he enlarged his experience of men and things. 
 From his father Fourier inherited a sum of about 
 ;^3000, with which he started business at Lyons, but 
 he lost all he had in the siege of that city by the 
 Jacobins during the Eeign of Terror, was thrown into 
 prison, and narrowly escaped the guillotine. On his 
 release he joined the army for two years, and then re- 
 turned to his old way of life. 
 
 At a very early age Fourier had his attention called 
 to the defects of the prevalent commercial system. 
 When only five years old he had. been punished for 
 speaking the truth about certain goods in his father's 
 shop; and at the age of twenty-seven he had at 
 Marseilles to superintend the destruction of an immense 
 quantity of rice held for higher prices during a scarcity 
 of food till it had become unfit for use. The conviction 
 grew within him that a system which involved such 
 abuses and immoralities must be radically evil. Feel- 
 ing it to be his mission to find a remedy for it, he spent 
 his life in the discovery, elucidation and propagation of 
 a better order ; and he brought to his task a self-denial 
 and singleness of purpose which have seldom been 
 surpassed. For the last ten years of his life he waited 
 in his apartments at noon every day for the wealthy 
 capitalist who should supply the means for the realise- 
 
30 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 tion of his schemes. The tangible success obtained by 
 his system was very slight. His works found few 
 readers and still fewer disciples. 
 
 It was chiefly after the decline of the Saint-Simon 
 movement that he gained a hearing and a little success. 
 A small group of enthusiastic adherents gathered round 
 him ; a journal was started for the propagation of his 
 views ; and in 1832 an attempt was made on lands near 
 Versailles to establish &phala7ige, which, however, proved 
 a total failure. In 1837 Fourier passed away from a 
 world that showed little inclination to listen to his 
 teaching. A singular altruism was in his character 
 blended with the most sanguine confidence in the 
 possibilities of human progress. Perhaps the weakest 
 point in his teaching was that he so greatly under- 
 estimated the strength of the unregenerate residuum in 
 human nature. His own life was a model of simplicity, 
 integrity, kindliness and disinterested devotion to what 
 he deemed the highest aims. 
 
 The social system of Fourier was, we need not say, 
 the central point in his speculations. But as his social 
 system was moulded and coloured by his peculiar views I 
 on theology, cosmogony and psychology, we must give 
 some account of these aspects of his teaching. In 
 theology Fourier inclined, though not decidedly, to what 
 is called pantheism ; the pantheistic conception of the 
 world which underlay the Saint-Simon theory of the 
 ' rehabilitation of the flesh ' may be said to form the 
 basis also of the social ethics and arrangements of 
 Tourier. Along with this he held a natural optimism 
 of the most radical and comprehensive character. God 
 
EARLY FRENCH SOCIALISM 31 
 
 has done all things well, only man has misunderstood 
 and thwarted His benevolent purposes. God pervades 
 everything as a universal attraction. Whereas Newton 
 discovered that the law of attraction governs one move- 
 ment of the world, Fourier shows that it is universal, 
 ruling the world in all its movements, which are four — 
 material, organic, intellectual, and social. It is the 
 same law of attraction which pervades all things, from 
 the cosmic harmony of the stars down to the puny life 
 of the minutest insect, and which would reign also in 
 the human soul and in human society, if the intentions 
 of the Creator were understood. In the elucidation of 
 his- system Fourier's aim simply is to interpret the 
 intentions of the Creator. He regards his philosophy, , 
 not as ingenious guesses or speculations, but as dis- 
 coveries plainly traceable from a few first principles ; 
 discoveries in no way doubtful, but the fruit of clear 
 insight into the divine law. 
 
 The cosmogony of Fourier is the most fantastic part 
 of a fantastic system. But as he did not consider his 
 views in this department an essential part of his system, 
 we need not dwell upon them. He believed that the 
 world is to exist for eighty thousand years, forty 
 thousand years of progress being followed by forty 
 thousand years of decline. As yet it has not reached 
 the adult stage, having' lasted only seven thousand 
 years. The present stage of the world is civilisation, 
 which Fourier uses as a comprehensive term for every- 
 thing artificial and corrupt, the result of perverted 
 human institutions, themselves due to the fact that we 
 have for five thousand years misunderstood the inten- 
 
32 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 tions of the Creator. The head and front of this mis- 
 understanding consists in our pronouncing passions to 
 be bad that are simply natural ; and there is but one 
 way of redressing it — ^to give a free and healthy and 
 complete development to our passions. 
 
 This leads us to the psychology of Fourier. He 
 recognised twelve radical passions connected with three 
 points of attraction. Five are sensitive (tending to 
 enjoyment) — sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. 
 Four are affective (tending to groups) — love, friendship, 
 ambition, and /amiZism or paternity. The meaning and 
 unction of these are obvious enough. The remaining 
 three, the alternating, emulative, and composite (which 
 he calls passions rectrices, and which tend to series or to 
 unity), are more special to Fourier. Of the three the 
 first is connected with the need of variety ; the second 
 leads to intrigue and jealousy; the third, full of 
 intoxication and abandonment, is born of the combina- 
 tion of several pleasures of the senses and of the soul 
 enjoyed simultaneously. The passions of the first two 
 classes are so far controlled by the passions rectrices, 
 and especially by the composite passion ; but even the 
 passions rectrices obviously contain elements of discord 
 and war. All, however, are ultimately harmonised by 
 a great social passion, which Fourier calls Vhiteisme. 
 Out of the free play of all the passions harmony is 
 evolved, like white out of the combination of the 
 colours. 
 
 The ■ speedy passage from social chaos to universal 
 iarmony contemplated by Fourier can, as we have seen, 
 ^be accomplished only by one method, by giving to the 
 
EARLY FRENCH SOCIALISM 33 
 
 human passions their natural development. For this / 
 end, a complete break with civilisation must be made. 
 We must have new social arrangements suitable to 
 human nature and in harmony with the intentions of 
 the Creator. These Fourier provides in the phalange. 
 In its normal form the phalange was to consist of four 
 hundred families or eighteen hundred persons, living on 
 a square league of land, self-contained and self-sufficing 
 for the most part, and combining within itself the means 
 for the free development of the most varied likings and 
 capacities. It was an institution in which agriculture, 
 industry, the appliances and opportunities of enjoyment, 
 and generally of the widest and freest human, develop- 
 ment, are combined, the interests of individual freedom 
 and of common union being reconciled in a way hitherto 
 unknown and nnimagined. 
 
 While the phalange is the social unit, the individuals 
 composing it will arrange themselves in groups of seven 
 or nine persons; from twenty-four to thirty-two. groups 
 form a series, and these unite to form a phalange — all 
 according to principles of attraction, of free elective 
 affinity. The dwelliug of the phalange was the phalan- 
 sUre, a vast, beautiful, and commodious structure, where 
 life could be arranged to suit every one, common or 
 solitary, according to preference ; but under such con-[ 
 ditions there would be neither excuse nor motive fori 
 the selfish seclusion, isolation, and suspicion so prevalent/ 
 in civilisation. 
 
 In such an institution it is obvious that government 
 under the form of compulsion and restraint would be 
 reduced to a minimum. The officials of the phalange 
 
 3 
 
34 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 would be elected. The phalange itseli was an experi- 
 ment on a local scale, which could easily be made, and 
 once successfully made would lead to world-wide imita- 
 tion. They would freely group themselves into wider 
 combinations with elected chiefs, and the phalanges of 
 the whole world would form a great federation with a 
 single elected chief, resident at Constantinople, which 
 would be the universal capital. 
 
 In all the arrangements of the phalange the principle 
 of free attraction would be observed. Love would be 
 free. Free unions should be formed, which could 
 be dissolved, or which might grow into permanent 
 marriage. 
 
 The labour of the phalange would be conducted on 
 scientific methods ; but it would, above all things, be 
 made attractive, by consulting the likings and capaci- 
 ties of the members, by frequent change of occupation, 
 by recourse to the principle of emulation in individuals, 
 groups, and series. On the principle that men and 
 women are eager for the greatest esertion, if only they 
 like it, Fourier bases his theory that all labour can be 
 made attractive by appealing to appropriate motives in 
 human nature. Obviously, also, what is now the most 
 disgusting labour could be more effectually performed 
 by machinery. 
 
 The product of labour was to be distributed in the 
 following manner : — Out of the common gain of the 
 phalange a very comfortable minimum was assured to 
 every member. Of the remainder, five-twelfths went 
 to labour, four-twelfths to capital, and three-twelfths 
 to talent. In the phalange individual capital existed, 
 
EARLY FRENCH SOCIALISM 35 
 
 and inequality of talent was not only admitted, but in- 
 sisted upon and utilised. In the actual distribution 
 the jahalaTtge treated with individuals. With regard to 
 the remuneration of indiyiduals under the head of 
 capital no difficulty could be felt, as a normal rate of 
 interest would be given on the advances made. Indi- 
 vidnal talent would be rewarded in accordance with 
 the services rendered in the management of the 
 phalange, the place of each being determined by elec- 
 tion. Labour would be remunerated on a principle 
 entirely different from the present. Hard and common 
 or necessary work should be best paid ; useful work 
 should come next, and pleasant work last of all. In 
 any case the reward of labour would be so great that 
 every one would have the opportunity of becoming a 
 capitalist. 
 
 One of the most notable results of the phalange 
 treating with each member individually is, that the 
 economic independence of women would be assured. 
 Even the child of five would have its own share in the 
 produce. 
 
 The system of Fourier may fairly be described as 
 one of the most ingenious and elaborate Utopias ever 
 devised by the human brain. But in many cardinal 
 points it has been constructed in complete contradiction 
 with all that experience and science have taught us of 
 human nature and the laws of social evolution. He 
 particularly under-estimates the force of human egotism. 
 From the beginning progress has consisted essentially 
 in the hard and strenuous repression of the beast within 
 the man, whereas Fourier would give it free rein. This 
 
36 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 applies to his system as a whole, and especially to his 
 theories on marriage. Instead of supplying a sudden 
 passage from social chaos to universal harmony, his 
 system would, after entirely subverting such order as we 
 have, only bring us back to social chaos. 
 
 Yet his works are full of suggestion and instruction, 
 and will long repay the study of the social economist. 
 His criticisms of the existing system, of its waste, 
 anarchy, and immorality, are ingenious, searching, and 
 often most convincing. In his positive proposals, too, 
 are to be found some of the most sagacious and far- 
 reaching foresight of the future landmarks of human 
 progress. Most noteworthy are the guarantees he 
 devised for individual and local freedom. The 'phalwuge, 
 was on the one hand large enough to secure all the 
 benefits of a scientific industry and of a varied common 
 life ; on the other it provides against the evils of cen- 
 tralisation, of State despotism, of false patriotism and 
 national jealousy. Fourier has forecast the part to be 
 played in the social and political development of the 
 future by the local body, whether we call it commune, 
 parish, or municipality. The fact that he has given it 
 a fantastic name, and surrounded it with many fantastic 
 conditions, should not hinder us from recognising his 
 great sagacity and originality. 
 
 The freedom of the individual and of the minority 
 is, moreover, protected against the possible tyranny of 
 the ^Tuilange by the existence, under reasonable limits 
 and under social control, of individual capital. This 
 individual capital further is perfectly mobile ; that is, 
 the possessor of it, if he thinks fit to migrate or go 
 
EARLY FRENCH SOCIALISM 37 
 
 on travel, may remove Ms capital, and find- a welcome 
 for his labour, talent, and investments in any part of the 
 world. Such arrangements of Fourier may suggest a 
 much-needed lesson to many of the contemporary 
 adherents of ' scientific socialism.' 
 
 While, therefore, we believe that Fourier's system was 
 as a whole entirely Utopian, he has with great saga- 
 city drawn the outlines of much of our political and 
 social progress; and while we believe that the full 
 development of human passions as recommended by 
 him would soon reduce us to social chaos, a time may 
 come in our ethical and rational growth when a widen- 
 ing freedom may be permitted and exercised, not by 
 casting off moral law, but by the perfect assimilation 
 of it. 
 
GHAPTEE III 
 
 FRENCH SOCIALISM OF 1848 
 
 The year 1 830 was an important era in the history of 
 socialism. During the fermentation of that time the 
 activity of the Saint-Simon school came to a crisis, and 
 the theories of Fourier had an opportunity of taking 
 practical shape. But by far the greatest result for 
 socialism of the revolutionary period of 1830 was the 
 definite establishment of the contrast between ' the 
 hov/rgeoisie and proletariat in Prance and England, the 
 two countries that held the foremost place in the modern 
 industrial, social, and political movement. Hitherto 
 the men who were afterwards destined consciously to 
 constitute those two classes had fought side by side 
 against feudalism and the reaction. Through the 
 restricted franchise introduced at this period in the two 
 countries just mentioned the middle class had become 
 the ruling power. 
 
 Excluded from political privileges and pressed by the 
 weight of adverse economic conditions, the proletariat 
 now appeared as the revolutionary party. The first 
 symptom in Prance of the altered state of things was 
 the outbreak at Lyons in 183 1, when the starving 
 workmen rose to arms with the device, ' Live working. 
 
French socialism of 1848 3^ 
 
 or die fighting.' Chartism was a larger phase of the 
 same movement in England. The theories of Saint- 
 Simon and Fourier had met with acceptance chiefly or 
 entirely among the educated classes. Socialism now 
 directly appealed to the working men. 
 
 In this chapter our concern is with the development 
 of the new form of socialism in France. Paris, which 
 had so long been the centre of revolutionary activity, 
 was now, and particularly during the latter half of the 
 reign of the hourgeois King, Louis Philippe, the seat 
 of socialistic fermentation. In 1839 Louis Blanc pub- 
 lished his Organisation du Travail, and Cabet his Voyage 
 en Icarie. In 1 840 Proudhon brought out his book on 
 property. Paris was the school to which youthful 
 innovators went to learn the lesson of revolution. At 
 this period she counted among her visitors Lassalle, the 
 founder of the Social Democracy of Germany; Karl 
 Marx, the chief of scientific international socialism; 
 and Bakunin, the apostle of anarchism. 
 
 The socialistic speculation associated with the three 
 men last mentioned was to have a far-reaching influence ; 
 but it did not- attain to full development till a later 
 period. The socialistic activity of Louis Blanc and 
 Proudhon culminated during the revolution of 1S48, 
 and exercised considerable influence on the course of 
 events in Paris at that time. 
 
40 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Louis Blanc 
 
 The socialism of Saint- Simon and Fourier was, as 
 we have seen, largely imaginative and Utopian, and 
 had only a very remote connection with the practical 
 life of their time. With Louis Blanc the movement 
 came into real contact with the national history of 
 France. In Louis Blanc's teaching the most conspicu- 
 ous feature was that he demanded the democratic 
 organisation of the State as preparatory to social re- 
 organisation. His system, therefore, had a positive 
 and practical basis, in -so far as it allied itself to a 
 dominant tendency in the existing State. 
 
 It is unnecessary here to recapitulate in detail the 
 life of Louis Blanc. He was born in 1811 at Madrid, 
 where his father was inspector-general of finance under 
 Joseph during his uncertain tenure of the Spanish 
 throne. At an early age he attained to eminence as a 
 journalist in Paris, and in 1839 established the Eevud 
 du ProgHs, in- which he first brought out his cele- 
 brated work on Socialism, the Organisation du Travail. 
 It was soon published in book form, and found a wide 
 popularity among the workmen of France, who were 
 captivated by the brilliancy of the style, the fervid 
 eloquence with which it exposed existing abuses, and 
 the simplicity and democratic fitness of the schemes for 
 the regeneration of society which it advocated. 
 
 The greater part of the book is taken up with 
 unsparing denunciations of the evils of competition. 
 
FRENCH SOCIALISM OF 1848 41 
 
 which, as common to Louis Blanc with other socialists, 
 need not detain us. More interesting are the practical 
 measures for their removal, proposed in his treatise.* 
 Like the socialists that preceded him, L. Blanc cannot 
 accept the views which teach a necessary antagonism 
 between soul and body; we must aim at the 
 harmonious development of both sides of our nature. 
 The formula of. progress is double in its unity ; moral 
 and material amelioration of the lot of all by the free 
 co-operation of all, and their fraternal association.! He 
 saw, however, that social reform could not be attained 
 without political reform. The first is the end, the 
 second is the means. It was not enough to discover the 
 trae methods for inaugurating the principle of associa- 
 tion and for organising labour in accordance with the 
 rules of reason, justice and humanity. It was necessary 
 to have political power on the side of social reform, 
 political power resting on the Chambers, on the 
 tribunals, and on the army: not to take it as an 
 instrument was to meet it as an obstacle. 
 
 For these reasons he wished to see the State 
 constituted on a thoroughly democratic basis, as the 
 first condition of success. The emancipation of the 
 proletarians was a question so difficult that it would 
 require the whole force of the State for its solution. 
 What is wanting to the working class are the instru- 
 ments of labour; the function of Government is to 
 furnish them. If we had to define what we consider 
 
 * Organisation du Travail. Fifth edition. 1848. 
 t Preface to fifth edition, Organisation du IVavail. 
 
42 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 the State to be, we should reply, "The State is the 
 banker of the poor." 
 
 Louis Blanc demanded that the democratic State 
 should create industrial associations, which he called 
 social workshops, and which were destined gradually and 
 without shock to supersede individual workshops. The 
 , State would provide the means ; it would draw up the 
 rules for their constitution, and it would appoint the 
 functionaries for the first year. But, once founded and 
 set in movement, the social workshop would be self- 
 supporting,; self-acting, and self-governing. The work- 
 men would choose their own directors and managers; 
 they would themselves arrange the division of the 
 profits, and would take measures to extend the fenter- 
 prise commenced. In such a system where would there 
 be room for arbitrary rule or tyranny? The State 
 would establish the social workshops, would pass laws 
 for them, and supervise their execution for the good of 
 all ; but its r61e would end there. Is this, can this be 
 tyranny ? Thus the freedom of the industrial associa- 
 tions, and of the individuals composing them would not 
 only remain intact ; it would have the solid support of 
 the State. The intervention of a democratic Govern- 
 ment on behalf of the people, whom it represented, 
 would remove the misery, anarchy, and oppression 
 necessarily attendant on the competitive system, and in 
 place of the delusive liberty of laissez-faire, would 
 establish a real and positive freedom. 
 
 With regard to the remuneration of talent and labour 
 L. Blanc takes very high ground. ' Genius,' Jie said, 
 ' should assert its legitimate empire, not by the, amount 
 
FRENCH SOCIALISM OF 1848 43 
 
 of the tribute which it will levy on society, but by the 
 greatness of the services which it will render.'. This is 
 no mere flourish of eloquence ; it is to be the principle 
 of remuneration in his associations. Society could not, 
 even if it would, repay the genius of a Newton ; Newton 
 had his just recompense in the joy of discovering the 
 laws by which worlds were governed. Exceptional en- 
 dowments must find development and a fitting reward 
 in the exceptional services they render to society. 
 
 L. Blanc therefore believed in a hierarchy according 
 to capacity ; remuneration according to capacity -he 
 admitted in the earlier editions of his work, but only 
 provisionally and as a concession to prevalent anti-social 
 opinion. In the edition of 1848, the year when his 
 theories attained for a time to historic importance, he 
 had withdrawn his concession. ' Though the false and 
 anti-social education given to the present ' generation 
 makes it difficult to find any other motive of emulation 
 and encouragement than a higher salary, the wages will 
 be equal, as the ideas and character of men will be 
 changed by an absolutely new education.'* Private 
 capitalists would be invited to join the associations, 
 and would under fixed conditions receive interest for 
 their advances ; but as the collective capital increased, 
 the opportunities for so placing individual capital would 
 surely diminish. The tyranny of capital would, in fact, 
 receive a mortal wound. 
 
 The revolution of 1848 was an important stage in 
 the development of democracy. In ancient and also in 
 mediaeval times the democracy was associated with city 
 * Organisation chi Travail, p. 103. 
 
44 A HISTORY OP SOCIALISM 
 
 life ; the citizens personally appeared and spoke and 
 voted in the Assemblies. The modern democracy has 
 grown in large States, extending over wide territories 
 and the citizen can exercise political power only through 
 elected representatives. Hence the importance of the 
 franchise in modern politics. The evolution of the 
 modern democracy has gone through a long succession 
 of phases, beginning with the early growth of the 
 English Parliament, and continued in the struggles of 
 the Dutch against the Spaniards, in the English revolu- 
 tions of 1.642 and 1688, in the American revolution of 
 1776, and the French revolution of 1789. In the early 
 struggles, however, the mass of the people had no very 
 great share. It was hardly till 1848 that the working 
 class made its entrance on the stage of history — in 
 Europe at least. 
 
 The revolutionary disturbances of 1 848 affected nearly 
 the whole of western and central Europe. It was a rising 
 of the peoples against antiquated political forms and 
 institutions ; against the arrangements of the Treaty of 
 Vienna, whereby Europe was partitioned according to 
 the convenience of ruling houses ; against irresponsible 
 Governments, which took no account of the wishes of 
 their subjects. 
 
 In France, the country with which we are now 
 specially concerned, the revolution was a revolt of the 
 people against a representative monarchy with a very 
 restricted franchise. It was not a deeply-planned 
 rising, and, indeed, was a surprise to those who wished 
 it and accomplished it. Yet it marked a most im- 
 portant stage in the progress of the world, for, as a 
 
FRENCH SOCIALISM OF 1848 45 
 
 result of it, men for the first time saw the legislature 
 of a great country established on principles of universal 
 suffrage, and the cause of the working men recognised 
 as a supreme duty of government. 
 
 Louis Blanc was the most prominent actor in what 
 may be called the social-democratic side of the French 
 Eevolution of 1848. Through his influence with the 
 working classes, and as representing their feelings and 
 aspirations, he obtained a place in the Provisional 
 Government. He was supported there by others like- 
 minded with himself, including one working man, 
 whose appearance in such a capacity was also a notable 
 event in modem history. But though circumstances 
 were so far favourable, he did not accomplish much. It 
 cannot be said that his plans obtained a fair hearing or 
 a fair trial. He was present in the Provisional Govern- 
 ment as the pioneer of a new cause, whose time had not 
 yet come. 
 
 The schemes for social reconstruction which he con- 
 templated were certainly not carried out in the national 
 workshops of that year. Prom the report of the Com- 
 mission of. Inquiry into the subject, subsequently 
 instituted by the French Government, and from the 
 History of the National Workshops, written by their 
 director, Bmile Thomas, it is perfectly clear that the 
 Tiational workshops were simply a travesty of the pro- 
 posals of Louis Blanc, established expressly to discredit 
 them. They were a means of finding work for the motley 
 proletariat thrown out of employment during the period 
 of revolutionary disturbance, and those men were put 
 to unproductive labour ; whereas of course Louis Blanc 
 
46 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 contemplated nothing but productive work, and the 
 men he proposed inviting to join his associations were 
 to give guarantees of character. It was intended, too, 
 by his opponents that the mob of workmen whom they 
 employed in the so-called national workshops would be 
 ready to assist their masters in the event of a struggle 
 with the Socialist party. 
 
 A number of private associations of a kind similar 
 to those proposed by Louis Blanc were indeed sub- 
 sidised by the Government. But of the whole sum 
 voted for this end, which amounted to only ;£' 120,000, 
 the greater part was applied to purposes quite foreign 
 from the grant. It was not the intention of the moving 
 spirits of the Government that they should succeed. 
 Moreover, the months following the revolution of 
 February were a period of industrial stagnation and 
 insecurity, when any project of trade, either on the old 
 or on the new lines, had little prospect of success. 
 Under these circumstances, the fact that a few of the 
 associations did prosper very fairly may be accepted as 
 proof that the scheme of Louis Blanc had in it the ele- 
 ments of vitality. The history of the whole matter 
 fully justifies the exclamation of Lassalle that ' lying is 
 a European power.'* It has been the subject of endless 
 misrepresentation by writers who have taken no pains 
 to verify the facts. 
 
 As one of the leaders during this difficult crisis, 
 Louis Blanc had neither personal force nor enduring 
 political influence sufficient to secure any solid suc- 
 cess for his cause. He was an amiable, genial, and 
 
 * Lassalle, Die FranzSsischen Nationalwerhsttitten von 1848. 
 
FRENCH SOCIALISM OF 1848 47 
 
 eloquent enthusiast, but without weight enough to be a 
 controller of men on a wide scale. The Labour Confer- 
 ences at the Luxembourg, over which he presided, ended 
 also, as his opponents desired, without any tangible 
 result. 
 
 The Assembly, elected on the principle of universal 
 suffrage, which met in May, showed that the peasantry 
 and the mass of the French people were not in accord 
 with the working classes of Paris, and of the industrial 
 centres. It did not approve of the social-democratic 
 activity urged by a section of the Provisional Govern- 
 ment. The national workshops also were closed, and the 
 proletariat of Paris rose in armed insurrection, which 
 was overthrown by Oavaignao in the sanguinary days of 
 June. Louis Blanc was in no way responsible for the 
 revolt, which can be called socialistic only in the sense 
 that the proletariat was engaged in it, the class of 
 which socialism claims to be the special champion. 
 
48 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Peoudhon 
 
 Pierre Joseph Proudhon was born in 1 809 at Besanpon 
 Fi'ance, the native place also of the socialist Fourier. 
 His origin was of the humblest, his father being a 
 brewer's cooper, and the boy herded cows and did 
 such other work as came in his way. But he was not 
 entirely self-educated ; at sixteen he entered the college 
 of his native place, though his family was so poor that 
 he could not procure the necessary books, and had to 
 borrow . them from his mates in order to copy the 
 lessons. There is a story of the young Proudhon re- 
 turning home laden with prizes, but to find that there 
 was no dinner for him. 
 
 At nineteen he became a working compositor, and 
 was afterwards promoted to be a corrector for the press, 
 reading proofs of ecclesiastical works, and thereby 
 acquiring a considerable knowledge of theology. In 
 this way also he came to learn Hebrew, and to compare 
 it with Greek, Latin, and French. It was the first 
 proof of his intellectual audacity that on the strength 
 of this he wrote an Essai de Grammaire ginirale. As 
 Proudhon knew nothing whatever of the true principles 
 of philology, his treatise was of no value. In 1838 he 
 obtained the pension Suard, a bursary of 1 500 francs a 
 year for three years, for the encouragement of young 
 men of promise, which was in the gift of the Academy 
 of Besanpon. In 1839 he wrote a treatise On the Utility 
 of Keeping the Sunday, which contained the germs of 
 
French socialism of 1848 49 
 
 Ms revolutionary ideas. About this time he went to 
 Paris, where he lived a poor, ascetic, and studious life, 
 making acquaintance, however, with the socialistic 
 ideas which were then fermenting in the capital. 
 
 In 1840 he published his first work, Qu'est-ce que la 
 PropriAU ? (What is Property ?) His famous answer 
 to this question. La jpropridU c'est le vol (Property is 
 theft) naturally did not please the academy of Besan- 
 fon, and there was some talk of withdrawing his pension ; 
 but he held it for the regular period.* 
 
 For his third memoir on property, which took the 
 shape of a letter to the Fourierist, M. Oonsidfrant, he 
 was tried at Besanpon, but was acquitted. In 1 846 he 
 published his greatest work, the SysUme des Ooniradic< 
 tions iconomiques, ou Fhilosophie de la Mis^re. For some 
 time Proudhon carried on a small printing establishment 
 at Besaufon, but without success ; and afterwards held 
 a post as a kind of manager with a commercial firm at 
 Lyons. In 1847 he left this employment, and finally 
 settled in Paris, where he was now becoming celebrated 
 as a leader of innovation. 
 
 He regretted the sudden outbreak of the revolution 
 of February because it found the social reformers 
 unprepared ; but he threw himself with ardour into 
 the conflict of opinion, and soon gained a national 
 notoriety. He was the moving spirit of the Bepri 
 
 * A complete edition of Proudhon's works including his posthu- 
 mous writings, was published at Paris, 1875. See P. J. Erovdhon, 
 sa Vie et sa Correspondamie, by Sainte-Beuve (Paris, 1875), an admir- 
 able work, unhappily not completed ; also Bevue des Deux Mondes,. 
 Jan. 1866 and Feb. 1873. 
 
 4 
 
St5 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 sentant du Peuple and other journals, in which the most 
 advanced theories were advocated in the strongest 
 language ; and as member of Assembly for the Seine 
 department he brought forward his celebrated proposal 
 for exacting an impost of one-third on interest and rent, 
 which of course was rejected. His attempt to found a 
 bank which should operate by granting gratuitous credit 
 was also a complete failure ; of the five million francs 
 which he required, only seventeen thousand were offered. 
 The violence of his utterances led to an imprisonment 
 at Paris for three years, during which he married a 
 young working woman. 
 
 As Proudhon aimed at economic rather than political 
 innovation, he had no special quarrel with the Second 
 Empire, and he lived in comparative quiet under it till 
 the publication of his work, De la Justice dans la Bivo- 
 lution et dans I'jEglise (1858), in which he attacked the 
 Church and other existing institutions with unusual 
 fury. This time he fled to Brussels to escape imprison- 
 ment. On his return to France his health broke down, 
 though he continued to write. He died at Passy in 
 1865. 
 
 Personally, Proudhon was one of the most remarkable 
 figures of modern France. His life was marked by the 
 severest simplicity and even Puritanism ; he was affec- 
 tionate in his domestic relations, a most loyal friend, 
 and strictly upright in conduct. He was strongly 
 opposed to the prevailing French socialism of his time 
 because of its utopianism and immorality ; and, though 
 he uttered all manner of wild paradox and vehement 
 invective against the dominant ideas and institutions, 
 
FRENCH SOCIALISM OF 1848 51 
 
 he was remarkably free from feelings of personal hate. 
 In all that he said and did he was the son of the people, 
 who had not been broken to the usual social and 
 academic discipline ; hence his roughness, his one- 
 sidedness, and his exaggerations. But he is always 
 vigorous, and often brilliant and original. 
 
 It would obviously be impossible to reduce the ideas 
 of such an irregular thinker to systematic form. In 
 later years Proudhon himself confessed that ' the great 
 part of his publications formed only a work of dissec- 
 tion and ventilation, so to speak, by means of which he 
 slowly makes his way towards a superior conception of 
 political and economic laws.' Yet the groundwork of 
 his teaching is clear and firm ; no one could insist with 
 greater emphasis on the demonstrative character of 
 economic principles as understood by himself. He 
 strongly believed in the absolute truth of a few moral 
 ideas, with which it was the aim of his teaching toi- 
 mould and sufiFuse political economy. Of these funda- 
 mental ideas, justice, liberty, and equality were the 
 chief. What he desiderated, for instance, in an ideal 
 society was the most perfect equality of remuneration. 
 It was his principle that service pays service, that a 
 day's labour balances a day's labour — in other words, 
 that the duration of labour is the just measure of value. 
 He did not shrink from any of the consequences of 
 this theory, for he would give the same remuneration 
 to the worst mason as to a Phidias ; but he looks for- 
 ward also to a period in human development when the 
 present inequality in the talent and capacity of men 
 would be reduced to an inappreciable minimum. 
 
52 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 From the great principle of service as the equivalent 
 of service is derived his axiom that property is the 
 right of auhaine. The aubain was a stranger not na- 
 turalised ; and the right of aubaine was the right in 
 virtue of which the Sovereign claimed the goods of such 
 a stranger who had died in his territory. Property is 
 a right of the same nature, with a like power of appro- 
 priation in the form of rent, interest, &c. It reaps 
 without labour, consumes without producing, and enjoys 
 without exertion. 
 
 Proudhon's aim, therefore, was to realise a science of 
 society resting on principles of justice, liberty, and 
 equality thus understood ; ' a science, absolute, rigor- 
 ous, based on the nature of man and of his faculties, 
 and on their mutual relations ; a science which we 
 have not to invent, but to discover.' But he saw 
 clearly that such ideas, with their necessary accom- 
 paniments could be realised only through a long and 
 laborious process of social transformation. As we have 
 said, he strongly detested the prurient immorality of 
 the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier. He attacked 
 them not less bitterly for thinking that society could 
 be changed ofF-hand by a ready-made and complete 
 scheme of reform. It was ' the most accursed lie,' he 
 said, ' that could be offered to mankind.' 
 
 In social change he distinguishes between the tran- 
 sition and the perfection or achievement. With regard 
 to the transition he advocated the progressive abolition 
 of the right of aubaine, by. reducing interest, rent, &c. 
 For the goal he professed only to give the general 
 principles; he had no ready-made scheme, no utopia. 
 
FRENCH SOCIALISM OF 1848 53 
 
 The positive organisation of the new society in its 
 details was a labour that would require fifty Montes- 
 quieus. The organisation he desired was one on 
 collective principles, a free association which would 
 take account of the division of labour, and which 
 would maintain the personality both of the man and 
 the citizen. With his strong and fervid feeling for 
 human dignity and liberty, Proudhon could not have 
 tolerated any theory of social change that did not give 
 full scope for the free development of man. Connected 
 with this was his famous paradox of anarchy, as the 
 goal of the free development of society, by which he 
 meant that through the ethical progress of men govern- 
 ment should become unnecessary. Each man should 
 be a law to himself. ' Government of man by man 
 in every form,' he says, 'is oppression. The highest 
 perfection of society is found in the union of order and 
 anarchy.^ 
 
 Proudhon 's theory of property as the right of aubaine 
 is substantially the same as the theory of capital held 
 by Marx and most of the later socialists. Property 
 and capital are defined and treated as the power of 
 exploiting the labour of other men, of claiming the 
 results of labour without giving an equivalent. Proud- 
 hon's famous paradox, ' Property is theft,' is merely a 
 trenchant expression of this general principle. As 
 slavery is assassination inasmuch as it destroys all that 
 is valuable and desirable in human personality, so pro- 
 perty is theft inasmuch as it appropriates the value 
 produced by the labour of others in the form of rent, 
 interest, or profit without rendering an equivalent. 
 
54 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 For property Proudhon would substitute individual 
 possession, the right of occupation being equal for all 
 men. > 
 
 With the bloodshed of the days of June French 
 socialism ceased for a time to be a considerable force ; 
 and Paris, too, for a time lost its place as the great 
 centre of innovation. The rising removed the most 
 enterprising leaders of the workmen and quelled the 
 spirit of the remainder, while the false prosperity of 
 the Second Empire relieved their most urgent grievances. 
 Under Napoleon III. there was consequently compara- 
 tive quietness in France. Even the International had 
 very little influence on French soil; though French 
 working men had an important share in originating it. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 
 
 EARLY ENGLISH SOCIALISM 
 
 OoMPAKED with the parallel movement in France the 
 early socialism of England had an uneventful history. In 
 order to appreciate the significance of Eobert Owen's 
 work it is necessary to recall some of the more important 
 features of the social condition of the country in his 
 time.- The English worker had no fixed interest in the 
 soil. He had no voice either in local or national 
 government. He had little education or none at all. 
 His dwelling was wretched in the extreme. The 
 right even of combination was denied him" till 1824. 
 The wages of the agricultural labourer were miserably 
 low. 
 
 The workman's share in the benefits of the industrial 
 revolution was doubtful. Great numbers of his class 
 were reduced to utter poverty and ruin by the great 
 changes consequent on the introduction of improved 
 machinery ; the tendency to readjustment was slow and 
 continually disturbed by fresh change. The hours of 
 work were mercilessly long. He had to compete 
 against the labour of women, and of children brought 
 frequently at the age of five or six from the work- 
 houses. These children had to work the same long 
 
56 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 hours as the adults, and they were sometimes very- 
 cruelly treated by the overseers. Destitute as they so 
 often were of parental protection and oversight, with 
 both sexes huddled together under immoral and 
 insanitary conditions, it was only natural that they 
 should fall into the worst habits, and that their off- 
 spring should to such a lamentable degree be vicious, 
 improvident, and physically degenerate. 
 
 In a country where the labourers had neither 
 education nor political or social rights, and where the 
 peasantry were practically landless serfs, the old 
 English poor-law was only a doubtful part of an evil 
 system. All these permanent causes of mischief were 
 aggravated by special causes connected with the cessa- 
 tion of the Napoleonic wars, which are well known. It 
 was in such circumstances, when English pauperism 
 had become a grave national question, that Owen first 
 brought forward his scheme of socialism. 
 
 Eobert Owen, philanthropist, and founder of English 
 socialism, was born at the village of Newtown, 
 Montgomeryshire, North Wales, in 1771.* His father 
 had a small business in Newtown as saddler and iron- 
 
 * Of E. Owen's numerous works in exposition of Ms system, the 
 most important are the New View of Society ; the JSeport commiini- 
 cated to the Committee on the Poor Law ; the Book of the New 
 Moral World ; and Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human 
 Race. See Life of Robert Owen written hy himself, London, 1857, and 
 Threading my Way, Twenty-seven Years of Autobiography, hjHohert 
 Dale Owen, his son, London, 1874. There are also JUves of Owen 
 by A. J. Booth (London, 1869) and by W. L. Sargant (London, i860) 
 For works of a more general character see G. J. Holyoake, History 
 of Co-operation in England, London, 1875 ; Adolf Held, Zwei Bilcher 
 %m socialen Geschiehte Englands, Leipsic, 1881. 
 
EARLY ENGLISH SOCIALISM 57 
 
 monger, and there young Owen received all his school 
 education, which terminated at the age of nine. At 
 ten he went to Stamford, where he served in a draper's 
 shop for three or four years., and, after a short ex 
 perience of work in a London shop, removed to Man- 
 chester. 
 
 His success at Manchester was very rapid. When 
 only nineteen years of age he became manager of a 
 cotton mill, in which five hundred people were em- 
 ployed, and by his administrative intelligence, energy, 
 industry, and steadiness soon made it one of the best 
 establishments of the kind in Great Britain. In this 
 factory Owen used the first bags of American sea- 
 island cotton ever imported into the country ; it was 
 the first cotton obtained from the Southern States of 
 America. Owen also made remarkable improvement 
 in the quality of the cotton spun. Indeed there is no 
 reason to doubt that at this early age he was the first 
 cotton-spinner in England, a position entirely due to 
 his own capacity and knowledge of the trade, as he had 
 found the mill in no well-ordered condition, and was 
 left to organise it entirely on his own responsibility. 
 
 Owen had become manager and one of the partners 
 of the Ohorlton Twist Company at Manchester, when 
 he made his first acquaintance with the scene of his 
 future philanthropic efibrts at New Lanark. During a 
 visit to Glasgow he had fallen in love with the daughter 
 of the proprietor of the New Lanark mills, Mr. Dale. 
 Owen induced his partners to purchase New Lanark ; 
 and after his marriage with Miss Dale he settled there, 
 in 1800, as manager and part owner of the mills. 
 
;8 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Encouraged by his great success in the management of 
 cotton factories in Manchester, he had already formed 
 the intention of conducting New Lanark on higher 
 principles than the current commercial ones. 
 
 The factory of New Lanark had been started in 
 1784 by Dale and Arkwright, the water-power afforded 
 by the falls of the Clyde being the great attraction. 
 Connected with the mills were about two thousand 
 people, five hundred of whom were children, brought, 
 most of them, at the age of five or six from the poor- 
 houses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The 
 children especially had been well treated by Dale, but 
 the general condition of the people was very unsatis- 
 factory. Many of then} were the lowest of the popula- 
 tion, the respectable country people refusing to submit 
 to the long hours and demoralising drudgery of the 
 factories. Theft, drunkenness, and other vices were 
 common ; education and sanitation were alike neglected ; 
 most families lived only in one room. 
 
 It was this population, thus committed to his care, 
 which Owen now set himself to elevate and ameliorate. 
 He greatly improved their houses, and by the unsparing 
 and benevolent exertion of his personal influence 
 trained them to habits of order, cleanliness, and thrift. 
 He opened a store, where the people could buy goods of 
 the soundest quality at little more than cost price ; 
 and the sale' of drink was placed under the strictest 
 supervision. His greatest success, however, was in the 
 education of the young, to which he devoted special 
 attention. He was the founder of infant schools in 
 Great Britain; and, though he was anticipated by 
 
EARLY ENGLISH SOCIALISM 59 
 
 Oontinental" reformers, he seems to have been led to 
 institute them by his own views of what education 
 ought to be, and without hint from abroad. 
 
 In all these plans Owen obtained the most gratifying 
 success. Though at first regarded with suspicion as a 
 stranger, he soon won the confidence of his people. 
 The mills continued to prosper commercially, but it is 
 needless to say that some of Owen's schemes involved 
 considerable expense, which was displeasing to his 
 partners. Wearied at last of the restrictions imposed 
 on him by men who wished to conduct the business on 
 the ordinary principles, Owen, in 18 13, formed a new 
 firm, who, content with 5 per cent, of return for their 
 capital, were ready to give freer scope to his philan- 
 thropy. In this firm Jeremy Bentham and the well- 
 known Quaker, William Allen, were partners. 
 
 In the same year Owen first appeared as an author 
 of essays, in which he expounded the principles on which 
 his system of educational philanthropy was based. 
 From an early age he had lost all belief in the pre- 
 vailing forms of religion, and had thought out a creed 
 for himself, which he considered an entirely new and 
 original discovery. The chief points in this philosophy 
 were that man's character is made not by him but for 
 him ; that it has been formed by circumstances over 
 which he had no control ; that he is not a proper sub- 
 ject either of praise or blame — ^these principles leading 
 up to the practical conclusion that .the great secret in 
 the right formation of man's character is to place him 
 under the proper influences, physical, moral, and 
 social, from his earliest years These principles, of 
 
6o A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 the irresponsibility of man and of the effect of early 
 influences, are the keynote of Owen's whole system of 
 education and social amelioration. As we have said, 
 they are embodied in his first work, A New View of 
 Society ; or, Essays on the Frinciple of the Formation of 
 the Human Character, the first of these essays (there 
 are four in all) being published in 1813. It is needless 
 to say that Owen's. new views theoretically belong to a 
 very old system of philosophy, and that his originality 
 is to be found only in his benevolent application of 
 them. 
 
 For the next few years Owen's work at New Lanark 
 continued to have a national and even a European 
 significance. His schemes for the education of his 
 workpeople attained to something like completion on 
 the opening of the institution at New Lanark in 18 16. 
 He was a zealous supporter of the factory legislation 
 resulting in the Act of 18 19, which, however, greatly 
 disappointed him. He had interviews and communica- 
 tions with the leading members of Government, in- 
 cluding the premier, Lord Liverpool, and with many of 
 the rulers and leading statesmen of the Continent. 
 New Lanark itself became a much-frequented place of 
 pilgrimage for social reformers, statesmen, and royal 
 personages, amongst whom was Nicholas, afterwards 
 Emperor of Russia. According to the unanimous testi- 
 mony of all who visited it, the results achieved by Owen 
 were singularly good. The manners of the children, 
 brought up under his system, were beautifully graceful, 
 genial, and unconstrained ; health, plenty, and content- 
 ment prevailed ; drunkenness was almost unknown, and 
 
EARLY ENGLISH SOCIALISM 6i 
 
 illegitimacy was extremely rare. The most perfect 
 good feeling subsisted between Owen and his work- 
 people ;' all the operations of the mill proceeded with 
 the utmost smoothness and regularity ; and the business 
 still enjoyed great prosperity. 
 
 Hitherto Owen's work had been that of a philan- 
 thropist, whose great distinction was the originality 
 and unwearying unselfishness of his methods. His 
 first departure in socialism took place in 1817, and was 
 embodied iu a report communicated to the Committee 
 of the House of Commons on the Poor Law. The 
 general misery and stagnation of trade consequent on 
 the termination of the great war were engrossing the 
 attention of the country. After clearly tracing the 
 special causes connected with the war which had led 
 to such a deplorable state of things, Owen pointed out 
 that the permanent cause of distress was to be found 
 in the competition of human labour with machinery, 
 and that the only effective remedy was the united 
 action of men, and the subordination , of machinery. 
 His proposals for the treatment of pauperism were 
 based on these principles. 
 
 He recommended that communities of about twelve 
 hundred persons each should be settled on spaces of land 
 of from 1000 to 1500 acres, all living in one large build- 
 ing in the form of a square, with public kitchen and 
 mess-rooms. Each family should have its own private 
 apartments, and the entire care of the children till the 
 age of three, after which they should be brought up by 
 the community, their parents having access to them at 
 meals and all other proper times. These communities 
 
62 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 might be established by individuals, by parishes, by 
 counties, or by the State ; in every case there should be 
 effective supervision by duly qualified persons. Work, 
 and the enjoyment of its results, should be in com- 
 mon. 
 
 The size of his community was no doubt partly sug- 
 gested by his village of New Lanark ; and he soon 
 proceeded to advocate such a scheme as the best form 
 for the reorganisation of society in general. In its 
 fully developed form — and it cannot be said to have 
 changed much during Owen's lifetime — it was as 
 follows. He considered an association of from 500 to 
 3000 as the fit number for a good working community. 
 While mainly agricultural, it should possess all the 
 best machinery, should offer every variety of employ- 
 ment, and should, as far as possible, be self-contained. 
 In other words his communities were intended to be self- 
 dependent units, which should provide the best educa- 
 tion, and the constant exercise of unselfish intelligence, 
 should unite the advantages of town and country life, 
 and should correct the monotonous activity of the factory 
 with the freest variety of occupation, while utilising all 
 the latest improvements in industrial technique. ' As 
 these townships,' as he also called them, ' should in- 
 crease in number, unions of them federatively united 
 shall be formed in circles of tens, hundreds, and 
 thousands,' till they should embrace the whole world in 
 one great republic with a common interest. 
 
 His plans for the cure of pauperism were received 
 with great favour. The Times and The Morning Post, 
 and many of the leading men of the country, counte- 
 
EARLY ENGLISH SOCIALISM 63 
 
 nanced them; one of his most steadfast friends was 
 the Duke of Kent, father of Queen "Victoria. He had 
 indeed gained the ear of the country, and had the 
 prospect before him of a great career as a social 
 reformer, when he went out of his way at a large 
 meeting in London to declare his hostility to all the 
 received forms of religion. After this defiance to the 
 religious sentiment of the country, Owen's theories were 
 in the popular mind associated with infidelity, and were 
 henceforward suspected and discredited. Owen's own 
 confidence, however, remained unshaken, and he was 
 anxious that his scheme for establishing a community 
 should be tested. At last, in 1825, such an experiment 
 was attempted under the direction of his disciple, 
 Abram Combe, at Orbiston, near Glasgow; and in 
 the same year Owen himself commenced another at 
 New Harmony, in Indiana, America. After a trial of 
 about two years both failed completely. Neither of 
 them was a pauper experiment; but it must be said 
 that the members were of the most motley description, 
 many worthy people of the highest aims being mixed 
 with vagrants, adventurers, and crotchety, wrong- 
 headed enthusiasts. 
 
 After a long period of friction with William Allen 
 and some of his other partners, Owen resigned all 
 connexion with New Lanark in 1828. On his return 
 from America he made London the centre of his 
 activity. Most of his means having been sunk in the 
 New Harmony experiment, he was no longer a flourish- 
 ing capitalist, but the head of a vigorous propaganda, in 
 which sdcialism and secularism were combined. One 
 
64 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 of the most interesting features of the movement at 
 this period was the establishment in 1832 of an 
 equitable labour exchange system, in which exchange 
 was effected by means of labour notes, the usual means 
 of exchange and the usual middlemen being alike 
 superseded. The word ' socialism ' first became current 
 in the discussions of the Association of all Classes of all 
 Nations, formed by Owen in 1835. 
 
 During these years also his secularistic teaching 
 gained such influence among the working classes as to 
 give occasion for the statement in the Westminster 
 Review {i2>ig) that his principles were the actual creed of 
 a great portion of them. His views on marriage, which 
 were certainly lax, gave just ground for offence. At 
 this period some more communistic experiments were 
 made, of which the most important were that at 
 Ealahine, in the county of Glare, Ireland, and that at 
 Tytherly, in Hampshire. It is admitted that the former 
 (1831) was a remarkable success for three and a half 
 years, till the proprietor, having ruined himself by 
 gambling, was obliged to sell out. Tytherly, begun in 
 1839, was an absolute failure. By 1846 the only 
 permanent result of Owen's agitation, so zealously 
 carried on by public meetings, pamphlets, periodicals, 
 and occasional treatises, was the co-operative move- 
 ment, and for the time even that seemed to have 
 utterly collapsed. In his later years Owen became a 
 firm believer in spiritualism. He died in 1858 at his 
 native town at the age of eighty-seven. 
 
 The causes of Owen's failure in establishing his 
 communities are obvious enough. Apart from the 
 
EARLY ENGLISH SOCIALISM 65 
 
 difficulties inherent in socialism, he injured the social 
 cause by going out of his way to attack the historic 
 religions and the accepted views on marriage, by his 
 tediousness, quixotry, and over-confidence, by refusing 
 to see that for the mass of men measures of transition 
 from an old to a new system must be adopted. If he 
 had been truer to his earlier methods and retained the 
 autocratic guidance of his experiments, the chances of 
 success would have been greater. Above all, Owen had 
 too great faith in human nature, and he did not under- 
 stand the laws of social evolution. His great doctrine 
 of the influence of circumstances in the formation of 
 character was only a very crude way of expressing the 
 law of social continuity so much emphasised by recent 
 socialism. He thought that he could break the chain of 
 continuity, and as by magic create a new set of cir- 
 cumstances, which would forthwith produce a new 
 generation of rational and unselfish men. The time 
 was too strong for him, and the current of English 
 history swept past him. 
 
 Even a very brief account of Owen, however, would 
 be incomplete without indicating his relation to 
 Malthus. Against Malthus he showed that the wealth 
 of the country had, in consequence of mechanical 
 improvement, increased out of all proportion to the 
 population. The problem, therefore, was not to restrict 
 population, but to institute rational social arrange- 
 ments and to secure a fair distribution of wealth. 
 Whenever the number of inhabitants in any of his 
 communities increased beyond the maximum, new ones 
 should be created, until they should extend over the whole 
 
 5 
 
66 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 world. There would be no fear of over-population for 
 a long time to come. Its evils were then felt in Ireland 
 and other countries ; but that condition of things was 
 owing to the total want of the most ordinary common 
 sense on the part of the blinded authorities of the 
 world. The period would probably never arrive when 
 the earth would be full ; but if it should, the human 
 race will be good, intelligent, and rational, and would 
 kaow much better than the present irrational genera- 
 tion how to provide for the occurrence. Such was 
 Owen's socialistic treatment of the population problem. 
 
 Robert Owen was essentially a pioneer, whose work 
 and inflaence it would be unjust to measure by their 
 tangible results. Apart from his socialistic theories, it 
 should, nevertheless, be remembered that he was one of 
 the foremost and most energetic promoters of many 
 movements of acknowledged and enduring usefulness. 
 He was the founder of infant schools in England ; he 
 was the first to introduce reasonably short hours into 
 factory labour, and zealously promoted factory legisla- 
 tion — one of the most needed and most beneficial 
 reforms of the century ; and he was the real founder of 
 the co-operative movement. In general education, in 
 sanitary reform, and in his sound and humanitarian 
 views of common life, he was far in advance of his 
 time. Like Fourier, also, he did the great service of 
 calling attention to the advantages which might be 
 obtained in the social development of the future, from 
 the re-organisation of the commune, or self-governing 
 local group of workers. 
 
 Still, he had many serious faults ; all that was 
 
EARLY ENGLISH SOCIALISM 67 
 
 quixotic, crude, and superficial in his views became 
 more prominent in his later years ; and by the extra- 
 vagance of his advocacy of them he did vital injury to 
 the cause he had at heart. In hia personal character he 
 was without reproach — frank, benevolent, and straight- 
 forward to a fault; and he pursued the altruistic 
 schemes in which he spent all his means with more 
 earnestness than most men devote to the accumulation 
 of a fortune. 
 
 In England the reform of 1832 had the same effect 
 as the revolution of July (1830) in France : it brought 
 the middle class into power, and by the exclusion of the 
 workmen emphasised their existence as a separate class. 
 The discontent of the workmen now found expression 
 in Chartism. As is obvious from the contents of the 
 Charter, Chartism was most prominently a demand 
 for political reform ; but both in its origin and in its 
 ultimate aim the movement was more essentially 
 economic. As regards the study of socialism, the 
 interest of this movement lies greatly in the fact that 
 in its organs the doctrine of ' surplus value,' afterwards 
 elaborated by Marx as the basis of his system, is broadly 
 and emphatically enunciated. While the worker pro- 
 duces all the wealth, he is obliged to content himself 
 with the meagre share necessary to support his existence, 
 and the surplus goes to the capitalist, who with the 
 king, the priests, lords, esquires, and gentlemen, lives 
 upon the labour of the working man {Poor Man's 
 Ouardian, 1835). 
 
 After the downfall of Owenism began the Christian 
 socialist movement in England (1848-52), of which the 
 
68 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 leaders were Maurice, Kingsley, and Mr. Ludlow. The 
 abortive Chartist demonstration of April 1848 excited 
 in Maurice and his friends the deepest sympathy with 
 the sufferings of the English working class — a feeling 
 which was intensified by the revelations regarding 
 ' London Labour and the Londoa Poor ' published in the 
 Morning Chronicle in 1849. Mr. Ludlow, who had in 
 France become acquainted with the theories of Fourier, 
 was the economist of the movement, and it was with 
 him that the idea originated of starting co-operative 
 associations. 
 
 In Politics f 01' the People, in the Christian Socialist, in 
 the pulpit and on the platform, and in Teast and Alton 
 ZocJce, well-known novels of Kingsley, the representa- 
 tives of the movement exposed the evils of the competi- 
 tive system, carried on an unsparing warfare against 
 the Manchester school, and maintained that socialism, 
 rightly understood, was only Christianity applied to 
 social reform. Their labours in insisting on ethical 
 and spiritual principles as the true bonds of society, in 
 promoting associations, and in diffusing a knowledge of 
 co-operation, were largely beneficial. In the north of 
 England they joined hands with the co-operative move- 
 ment inaugurated by the Rochdale pioneers in 1844 
 under the influence of Owenism. Productive co- 
 operation made very little progress, but co-operative 
 distribution soon proved a great success. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 FERDINAND LASSALLE 
 
 I. Life 
 
 In 1852 the twofold socialist movement in France 
 and England had come to an end, leaving no visible 
 result of any importance. From that date the most 
 prominent leaders of socialism have been German and 
 Russian. 
 
 German socialists also played a part in the revolution 
 of 1848 and in the years that preceded it; but as the 
 work that makes their names really historical was not 
 performed till a later period, we have postponed the 
 consideration of it till now, when we can treat it as 
 a whole. The most conspicuous chiefs of German social- 
 ism have been Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lassalle, 
 and Rodbertus. Of these, Lassalle * was the first to 
 make his mark in history as the originator of the social- 
 democratic movement in Germany. 
 
 Ferdinand Lassalle was bom at Breslau in 1825. 
 
 * The most important works of Lassalle are mentioned in the 
 text. See Georg Brandes, Ferdinand Lassalle; Franz Mehring, Die 
 Deutsche Sodaldemohratie, ihre Geschichie vmd ihre Lehre; W. H. 
 Dawson, Oerman Socialism and Ferdinand Lassalle. 
 
70 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Like Karl Marx, the chief of international socialism, 
 he was of Jewish extraction. His father, a prosperous 
 merchant in Breslau, intended Ferdinand for a business 
 career; and with this view sent him to the commercial 
 school at Leipsic; but the boy, having no liking for 
 that kind of life, got himself transferred to the univer- 
 sity, first at Breslau, and afterwards at Berlin. His 
 favourite studies were philology and philosophy; he 
 became an ardent Hegelian, and in politics was one of 
 the most advanced. Having completed his university 
 studiesin 1845, he began to write a work on Heradeitus 
 from the Hegelian point of view ; but it was soon 
 interrupted by more stirring interests, and did not see 
 the light for many years. 
 
 From the Ehine country, where he settled for a time, 
 he went to Paris, and made the acquaintance of his 
 great compatriot Heine, who conceived for him the 
 deepest sympathy and admiration. In the letter of 
 introduction to Varnhagen von Ense, which the poet 
 gave Lassalle when he returned to Berlin, there is a 
 striking portrait of the future agitator. Heine speaks 
 of his friend Lassalle as a young man of the most 
 remarkable endowments, in whom the widest know- 
 ledge, the greatest acuteness, and the richest gifts of 
 expression are combined with an energy and practical 
 ability which excite his astonishment ; but adds, in his 
 half-mocking way, that he is a genuine son of the new 
 era, without even the pretence of modesty or self-denial, 
 who will assert and enjoy himself in the world of reali- 
 ties. At Berlin Lassalle became a favourite in some 
 of the most distinguished circles ; even the veteran 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 71 
 
 Humboldt was fascinated by him, and used to call bim 
 the Wunderkind. 
 
 Here it was also, early in 1 846, that he met the lady 
 with whom his life was to be associated in so striking a 
 way, the Countess Hatzfeldt. She had been separated 
 from her husband for many years, and was at feud with 
 him on questions of property and the custody of their 
 children. With characteristic energy Lassalle adopted 
 the cause of the countess, whom he believed to have 
 been outrageously wronged, made a special study of law, 
 and, after bringing the case .before thirty-six tribunals, 
 reduced the powerful count to a compromise on terms 
 most favourable to his client. The process, which lasted 
 eight years, gave rise to not a little scandal, especially 
 that of the Oassettengeschichte. This ' affair of the casket ' 
 arose out of an attempt by the countess's friends to get 
 possession of a bond for a large life-annuity settled by 
 the count on his mistress, a Baroness Meyendorf, to the 
 prejudice of the countess and her children. At the 
 instigation of Lassalle, two of his comrades succeeded 
 in carrying off a casket, which was supposed to contain 
 the document in question (but which really contained 
 her jewels), from the baroness's room at a hotel in 
 Cologne. They were prosecuted for theft, one of them 
 being condemned to six months' imprisonment. Lassalle 
 himself was accused of nioral complicity, but was 
 acquitted on appeal. 
 
 His intimate relations with the countess, which con- 
 tinued till the end, certainly did not tend to improve 
 Lassalle'a position in German society. Eightly or 
 wrongly, people had an unfavourable impression of him, 
 
72 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 as of an adventurer. Here we can but say that he 
 claimed to act from the noblest motives ; in the indi- 
 vidual lot and suffering of the countess he saw the 
 social misery of the time reflected, and his assertion of 
 her cause was a moral insurrection against it. While 
 the case was pending, he gave the countess a share of 
 his allowance from his father ; and after it was won, 
 he received, according to agreement, from the now 
 ample resources of the lady, an annual income of four 
 thousand thalers (£606). Added to his own private 
 means, this sum placed the finances of Lassalle on a 
 sure footing for the rest of his life. His conduct was a 
 mixture of chivalry and business, which every one must 
 judge for himself. It was certainly not in accordance 
 with the conventionalities, but for these Lassalle never 
 entertained much respect. 
 
 In 1848 Lassalle attached himself to the group of 
 men, Karl Marx,' Bngels, Preiligrath, and others, who 
 in the Ehine country represented the socialistic and 
 extreme democratic side of the revolution, and whose 
 organ was the Mew Ehenish Gazette. But the activity 
 of Lassalle was only local and subordinate. He was, 
 however, condemned to six months' imprisonment for 
 resisting th© authorities at Dusseldorf. On that occa- 
 sion Lassalle delivered the first of the political speeches 
 which made so great an impression on all who listened 
 to them and read them. This speech also contains the 
 first important statement of his social and political 
 opinions. ' I will always joyfully confess,' he said, 
 ' that from inner conviction I am a decided adherent of 
 the social-democratic republic' 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 73 
 
 Till 1858 Lassalle resided mostly in the Rhine 
 country, prosecuting the suit of hisjriend the countess, 
 and afterwards completing his work on Heracleitns, 
 which was published in that year. He was not allowed 
 to live in Berlin because of his connection with the 
 disturbances of 1848. In 1859 he returned to the capital 
 disguised as a carter, and finally, through the influence 
 of Humboldt with the king, received permission to remain. 
 The same year he published a remarkable pamphlet on 
 The Italian War and the Mission of Prussia, in which 
 he came forward to warn his countrymen against going 
 to the rescue of Austria in her war with France. He 
 argued that if Prance drove Austria out of Italy she 
 might annex Savoy, but could not prevent the restora- 
 tion of Italian unity under Victor Emmanuel. Prance 
 was doing the work of Germany by weakening Austria, 
 the great cause of German disunion and weakness; 
 Prussia should form an alliance with Prance in order 
 to drive out Austria and make herself supreme in 
 Germany. After their realisation by Bismarck, these 
 ideas have become sufficiently commonplace ; but 
 they were nowise obvious when thus published by 
 Lassalle. In this, as in other matters, he showed 
 that he possessed both the insight and foresight of a 
 statesman. 
 
 In the course of the Hatzfeldt suit Lassalle had ac- 
 quired no little knowledge of law, which proved service- 
 able to him in the great work. System of Acquired BigUs, 
 published in 186 1. The book professes to be, and in a 
 great measure is, an application of the historical method 
 to legal ideas and institutions ; but it is largely domi- 
 
74 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 nated also by abstract conceptions, which are not really 
 drawn from history, but read into it. The results of his 
 investigation are sufficiently revolutionary ; in the legal 
 sphere they go even farther than his socialistic writings 
 in the economic and political. But with one important 
 exception he made no attempt to base his socialistic 
 agitation on his System of Acquired Bights ; it simply 
 j'emained a learned work. 
 
 Hitherto Lassalle had been known only as the author 
 of two learned works, aud as connected with one of the 
 most extraordinary lawsuits of the nineteenth century, 
 which had become a widespread scandal. Now began 
 the brief activity which was to give him an historical 
 significance. His revolutionary activity in 1 848, though 
 only a short j)hase in his career, was not an accident ; 
 it represented a permanent feature of his character. In 
 him the student and the man of action were combined 
 in a notable manner, but the craving for effective action 
 was eminently strong. The revolutionary and the active 
 elements in his strangely mixed nature had for want of 
 an opportunity been for many years in abeyance. A 
 rare opportunity had at last come for asserting his old 
 convictions. In the struggle between the Prussian 
 Government and the Opposition he saw an opportunity 
 for vindicating a great cause, that of the working men, 
 which would outflank the Liberalism of the middle 
 classes, and might command the sympathy and respect 
 of the Government. But his political programme was 
 entirely subordinate to the social, that of bettering the 
 condition of the working classes ; and he believed that 
 as their champion he might have such influence in the 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 75 
 
 Prussian State as to determine it on entering on a great 
 career of social amelioration. 
 
 The social activity of Lassalle dates from the year 
 1862. It was a time of new life in Germany. The 
 forces destined to transform the Germany of Hegel into 
 the Germany of Bismarck were preparing. The time 
 for the restoration and unification of the Fatherland 
 under the leadership of Prussia had come. The nation 
 that had so long been foremost in philosophy and theory 
 was to take a leading place in the practical walks of 
 national life, in war and politics, and in the modern 
 methods of industry. The man who lately died as first 
 Emperor of the New Germany ascended the throne of 
 Prussia in 1861. Bismarck, whose mission it was to 
 take the chief part in this great transformation, entered 
 on the scene as Chief Minister of Prussia in the autumn 
 of 1862. The Progressist party, that phase of German 
 Liberalism which was to offer such bitter opposition 
 both to Bismarck and Lassalle, came into existence in 
 1861. 
 
 For accomplishing this world-historic change the 
 decisive factor was the Prussian army. The new rulers 
 of Prussia clearly saw that for the success of their plans 
 everything would depend on the efficiency of the army. 
 But on the question of its reorganisation they came 
 into conflict with the Liberals, who, failing to compre- 
 hend the policy of Bismarck, refused him the supplies 
 necessary for realising ideals dear to every German 
 patriot. 
 
 In the controversy so bitterly waged between the 
 Prussian monarchy and the Liberals, Lassalle intervened. 
 
76 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 As might be expected, he was not a man to be bound by 
 the formulas of Prassian Liberalism, and in a lecture, 
 On the Nature of a Constitution, delivered early in 1862, 
 he expounded views entirely at variance with them. In 
 this lecture his aim was to show that a constitution is 
 not a theory or a document written on paper ; it is the 
 expression of the strongest political forces of the time. 
 The king, the nobility, the middle class, the working 
 class, all these are forces in the polity of Prussia ; but 
 the strongest of all is the king, who possesses in the 
 army a means of political power, which is organised, 
 excellently disciplined, always at hand, and always ready 
 to march. The army is the basis of the actual work- 
 ing constitution of Prussia. In the struggle against a 
 Government resting on such a basis, verbal protests 
 and compromises were of no avail. 
 
 In a second lecture, What Next ? Lassalle proceeded to 
 maintain that there was only one method for effectually 
 resisting the Government, to proclaim the facts of the 
 political situation as they were, and then to retire from 
 the Chamber. By remaining they only gave a false 
 appearance of legality to the doings of the Govern- 
 ment. If they withdrew it must yield, as in the present 
 state of political opinion in Prussia and in civilised 
 Europe no Government could exist in defiance of the 
 wishes of the people. 
 
 In a pamphlet subsequently published under the title 
 of Might and Right, Lassalle defended himself against 
 the accusation that in these lectures he had subordi- 
 nated the claims of Eight to those of Force. He had, he 
 said, not been expressing his own views of what ought 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE TJ 
 
 to be ; he had simply been elucidating facts in an his- 
 torical way, he had only been explaining the real nature 
 of the situation. He now went on to declare that no 
 one in the Prussian State had any right to speak of 
 Right but the old and genuine democracy. It had 
 always cleaved to the Right, degrading itself by no com- 
 promise with power. With the democracy alone is 
 Right, and with it alone will be Might. 
 
 We need not say that these utterances of Lassalle 
 had no influence on the march of events. The rulers 
 pushed on the reorganising of the army with supplies 
 obtained without the consent of the Prussian Chambers, 
 the Liberal members protesting in vain ,till the great 
 victory over Austria in 1866 furnished an ample justi- 
 fication for the policy of Bismarck. 
 
 But their publication marked an important crisis in 
 his own career, for they did not recommend him to the 
 favourable consideration of the German Liberals with 
 whom he had previously endeavoured to act. He and 
 they never had much sympathy for one another. They 
 were fettered by formulas as well as wanting in energy 
 and initiative. On the other hand, his adventurous 
 career ; his temperament, which disposed him to rebel 
 against the conventionalities and formulas generally; 
 his loyalty to the extreme democracy of 1848, all brought 
 him into disharmony with the current Liberalism of his 
 time. They gave him no tokens of their confidence, 
 and he chose a path of his own. 
 
 A more decisive step in a new direction was taken in 
 1862 by his lecture, The, Working-men's Programme; On 
 the special Cormection of the Present Epoch ofEistory with 
 
78 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 the Idea of the Worhing Glass. The gist of this lecture 
 was to show that we are now entering on a new era of 
 history, of which the working class are the makers and 
 representatives. It is a masterly performance, lucid in 
 style, and scientific in method of treatment. Yet this did 
 not save its author from the attentions of the Prussian 
 police. Lassalle was brought to trial on the charge of 
 exciting the poor against the rich, and in spite of an 
 able defence, published under the title oi Science and the 
 Workers, he was condemned to four months' imprison- 
 ment. But he appealed, and on the second hearing of 
 the case made such an impression on the judges that 
 the sentence was commuted into a fine of ;^ 1 5 . 
 
 Such proceedings naturally brought Lassalle into 
 prominence as the exponent of a new way of thinking 
 on social and political subjects. A section of the 
 working men were, like himself, discontented with the 
 current German Liberalism. The old democracy of 
 1848 was beginning to awake from the apathy and 
 lassitude consequent on the failures of that troubled 
 period. Men imbued with the traditions and aspira- 
 tions of such a time could not be satisfied with the 
 half-hearted programme of the Progressists, who would 
 not decide on adopting universal suffrage as part of their 
 policy, yet wished to utilise the workmen for their own 
 ends. A Liberalism which had not the courage to be 
 frankly democratic, could only be a temporary and 
 unsatisfactory phase of political development. 
 
 This discontent found expression at Leipsic, where a 
 body of workmen, displeased with the Progressists, yet 
 undecided as to any clear line of policy, had formed a 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 79 
 
 Central Committee for the calling together of a Work- 
 ing Men's Congress. With Lassalle, they had common 
 ground in their discontent with the Progressists, and 
 to him in 1 863 they applied, in the hope that he might 
 suggest a definite line of action. Lassalle replied in an 
 Open Letter, with a political and social- economic pro- 
 gramme, which, for lucidity and comprehensiveness of 
 statement, left nothing to be desired. In the Workirig 
 Men's Programme, Lassalle had drawn the rough out- 
 lines of a new historic period, in which the interests of 
 labour should be paramount; in the Open Letter he 
 expounds the political, social, and economic principles 
 which should guide the working men in inaugurating 
 the new era. The Open Letter has well been called the 
 Charter of German Socialism. It was the first historic 
 act in a new stage of social development. We need 
 not say that it marked the definite rupture of Lassalle 
 with German Liberalism. 
 
 In the Open Letter the guiding principles of the 
 social-democratic agitation of Lassalle are given with 
 absolute clearness and decision, that the working men 
 should form an independent political party — one, how- 
 ever, in which the political programme should be 
 entirely subordinated to the great social end of im- 
 proving the condition of their class ; that the schemes 
 of Schulze-Delitzsch* for this end were inadequate; 
 
 * Sohulze-Delitzsch was born in 1808 at Delltzsoh, in Prussian 
 Saxony, whence the second part of his name, to distinguish him 
 from the many other people in Germany who bear the familiar name 
 of Schulze. It was his great merit that he founded the co-operative 
 movement in Germanj on principles of self-help. He was a leading 
 ineBiber of the Progressist party. 
 
8o A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 that the operation of the iron law of wages prevented 
 any real improvement under the existing conditions ; 
 that productive associations, by which the workmen 
 should secure the full product of their labour, should 
 be established by the State, founded on universal 
 suffrage, and therefore truly representative of the 
 people. The Leipsic Committee accepted the policy 
 thus sketched, and invited him to address them in 
 person. After hearing him the meeting voted in his 
 favour by a majority of 1 300 against 7. 
 
 A subsequent appearance at Prankfort-on-the-Main 
 was even more flattering to Lassalle. In that as in 
 most other towns of Germany the workmen were 
 generally disposed to support Schulze and the Pro- 
 gressist party. Lassalle, therefore, had the hard task 
 of conciliating and gaining a hearing from a hostile 
 audience. His first speech, four hours in length, met 
 with a somewhat stormy reception, and was frequently 
 interrupted. But when, only two days afterwards, he ad- 
 dressed them a second time, Lassalle carried with him 
 the sympathies of his audience. At the conclusion, 
 Schulze's adherents to the number of forty left the place 
 of meeting, and then the assembly voted for Lassalle by 
 400 to I. It was really a great triumph. Like 
 Napoleon, he had, he said, beaten the enemy with their 
 own troops. On the following day he addressed • a 
 meeting at Mainz, where also he triumphed with 800 
 votes against 2. 
 
 These successes seemed to justify Lassalle in taking 
 the decisive step of his agitation — the foundation of 
 the Universal German Working Men's Association, 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 81 
 
 which followed at Leipsic on May 23, 1863. Its pro- 
 gramme was a simple one, containing only one point — 
 universal suffrage. 'Proceeding from the conviction 
 that only through equal and direct universal suffrage * 
 can a suflScient representation of the social interests 
 of the German working class and a real removal of 
 class antagonisms in society be realised, the Associa- 
 tion pursues the aim, in a peaceful and legal way, 
 especially by winning over public opinion, to work for 
 the establishment of equal and direct universal 
 suffrage.' 
 
 Hitherto Lassalle had been an isolated individual, 
 expressing on his own responsibility an opinion on the 
 topics of the day. He was elected President, for five 
 years, of the newly founded Association, and was 
 therefore the head of a new movement. He had 
 crossed the Kubicon, not without hesitation and mis- 
 giving. 
 
 In the summer of 1863 little was accomplished. 
 The membership of the Association grew but slowly, 
 and, according to his wont, Lassalle retired to the baths 
 to recruit his health. In the autumn he renewed his 
 agitation by a 'review' of his forces on the Rhine, 
 where the workmen were most enthusiastic in his 
 favour. But the severest crisis of his agitation befell 
 during the winter of 1863-4. -^t tliis period his 
 labours were almost more than human; he wrote his 
 
 * In contrast to the unequal and indirect system existing in 
 Prussia, according to which the voters are on a property basis 
 divided into three classes. The voters thus arranged choose bodies 
 of electors, by whom the members for the Chamber are chosen. 
 
 6 
 
82 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Bastiat-Sckulze,* a considerable treatise, in about three 
 montlis, defended himself before the Courts both of 
 Berlin and the Rhine in elaborate speeches, conducted 
 the affairs of his Association in all their troublesome 
 details, and often before stormy and hostile audiences 
 gave a succession of addresses, the aim of which was 
 the conquest of Berlin. 
 
 Lassalle's Bastiat-Schulze, his largest economic work, 
 bears all the marks of the haste and feverishness of the 
 time that gave it birth. It contains passages in the 
 worst possible taste ; the coarseness and scurrility of 
 his treatment of Schulze are absolutely unjustifiable. 
 The book consists of barren and unprofitable contro- 
 versy, interspersed with philosophic statements of his 
 economic position, and even they are often crude, con- 
 fused, and exaggerated. Controversy is usually the 
 most unsatisfactory department of literature, and of 
 the various forms of controversy that of Lassalle is the 
 least to be desired, consisting as it so largely did of 
 supercilious verbal and captious objection. The book 
 as a whole is far below the level of the Working Men's 
 Programme and the Open Letter. 
 
 After all these labours little wonder that we find him 
 writing, on the 14th of February : ' I am tired to death, 
 and strong as my constitution is, it is shaking to the 
 Core. My excitement is so great that I can no longer 
 sleep at night; I toss about on my bed till five o'clock, 
 
 * Bastiat was the populariser in France of the orthodox 
 Political Economy. Lassalle accused Schulze of being a mere echo 
 of Bastiat's superficial views, and therefore called him Bastiat- 
 Schulze. 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE §3 
 
 and rise up with aching head, and entirely exhausted. 
 I am overworked, overtasked, and overtired in the 
 frightfullest degree ; the mad effort, beside my other 
 labours, to finish the BasHaf-Schulze in three months, 
 the profound and painful disappointment, the cankering 
 inner disgust, caused by the indifierence and apathy of 
 the working class taken as a whole — all has been too 
 much even for me.' 
 
 Clearly the great agitator needed rest, and he decided 
 to seek it, as usual, at the baths. Bat before he retired, 
 he desired once more to refresh his weary soul in the 
 sympathetic enthusiasm which he anticipated from his 
 devoted adherents on the Ehine. Accordingly, on the 
 8th May 1864, Lassalle departed for the 'glorious 
 review of his army ' in the Ehine country. ' He 
 spoke,' Mehring tells us, ' on May 14th at Solingen, 
 on the 15th at Barmen, on the i6th at Cologne, on the 
 1 8th at Wermelskirchen.' His journey was like a royal 
 progress or a triumphal procession, except that the joy 
 of the people was perfectly spontaneous. Thousands 
 of workmen received him with acclamations; crowds 
 pressed upon him to shake hands with him, to exchange 
 friendly greetings with him. 
 
 On the 22nd May, the first anniversary festival of 
 the Universal Association, held at Ronsdorf, the enthu- 
 siasm reached its climax. Old and young, men and 
 women, went forth to meet him as he approached the 
 town; and he entered it through triumphal arches, 
 under a deluge of flowers thrown from the hands of 
 working girls, amidst jubilation indescribable. Writing 
 to the Countess of Hatzf eldt about this time of the im- 
 
84 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 pression made on his mind by his reception on the 
 Ehine, Lassalle says, 'I had the feeling that such 
 scenes must have been witnessed at the founding of 
 new rehgions.' 
 
 The speech of Lassalle at Eonsdorf corresponded in 
 character with the enthusiasm and exaltation of such a 
 time and such an audience. The King of Prussia had 
 recently listened with favour to the grievances of a 
 deputation of Silesian weavers, and promised to help 
 them out of his own purse. Von Ketteler, Bishop of 
 Mainz, had published a short treatise, in which he 
 expressed his agreement with Lassalle's criticism of the 
 existing economic system. As his manner was, Lassalle 
 did not under-estimate the value of those expressions 
 of opinion. ' We have compelled,' he declared, ' the 
 workmen, the people, the bishops, the king, to bear 
 testimony to the truth of our principles.' 
 
 It would be easy to ridicule the enthusiasm for 
 Lassalle entertained by those workmen on the Ehine, 
 but it will be more profitable if we pause for a moment 
 to realise the world-historic pathos of the scene. For the 
 first time for many centuries we see the working men of 
 Germany aroused from their hereditary degradation, 
 apathy, and hopelessness. Change after change had 
 passed in the higher sphere of politics. One conqueror 
 after another had traversed these Ehine countries, but, 
 whoever lost or won, it was the working man who had 
 to pay with his sweat and toil and sorrow. He was the 
 anvil on which the hammer of those iron times had 
 fallen without mercy and without intermission. His 
 doom it was to drudge, to be fleeced, to be drilled and 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 85 
 
 marched oflF to fight battles in which he had no 
 interest. Brief and fitful gleams of a wild and 
 desperate hope had visited these poor people before, 
 only to go out again in utter darkness; but now 
 in a sky which had so long been black and dull 
 with monotonous misery, the rays were discernible of 
 approaching dawn, a shining light which would grow 
 into a more perfect day. For in the process of history 
 the time had come when the suffering which had so long 
 been dumb should find a voice that would be heard 
 over the world, should find an organisation that would 
 compel the attention of rulers and all men. 
 
 Such a cause can be most effectually furthered by 
 wise and sane leadership ; yet it is also well when it is 
 not too dependent on the guidance of those who seek to 
 control it. The career of Lassalle always had its un- 
 pleasant features. He liked the passing effect too well. 
 He was too fond of display and pleasure. In much 
 that he did there is a note of exaggeration, bordering 
 on insincerity. As his agitation proceeded, this feature 
 of his character becomes more marked. Some of his 
 addresses to the workmen remind us too forcibly of the 
 bulletins of the first Napoleon. He was not always 
 careful to have the firm ground of fact and reality beneath 
 his feet. Many of his critics speak of the failure of his 
 agitation ; with no good reason, considering how short 
 a time it had continued, hardly more than a year. 
 Lassalle himself was greatly disappointed with the 
 comparatively little success he had attained. He had 
 not the patience to wait till the sure operation of truth 
 and fact and the justice of the cause he fought for 
 
86 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 should bring him the reward it merited. On all these 
 grounds we cannot consider the event which so un- 
 worthily closed his life as an accident; it was the 
 melancholy outcome of the weaker elements in his 
 strangely mixed character. 
 
 While posing as the spokesman of the poor, Lassalle 
 was a man of decidedly fashionable and luxurious habits. 
 His suppers were well known as among the most 
 exquisite in Berlin. It was the most piquant feature 
 of his life that he, one of the gilded youth, a connoisseur 
 in wines, and a learned man to boot, had become agi- 
 tator and the champion of the workers. In one of the 
 literary and fashionable circles of Berlin he had met a 
 young lady, a Praulein von Donniges, for whom he at 
 once felt a passion which was ardently reciprocated. 
 He met her again on the Rigi, in the summer of 1864, 
 when they resolved to marry. She was a young lady 
 of twenty, decidedly unconventional and original in 
 character. It would appear from her own confession 
 that she had not always respected the sacred German 
 morality. 
 
 But she had for father a Bavarian diplomatist then 
 resident at Geneva, who was angry beyond all bounds 
 when he heard of the proposed match, and would have 
 absolutely nothing to do with Lassalle. The lady was 
 imprisoned in her own room, and soon, apparently under 
 the influence of very questionable pressure, renounced 
 Lassalle in favour of another admirer, a Wallachian, 
 Count von Racowitza. Lassalle, who had resorted to 
 every available means to gain his end, was now mad 
 with rage, and sent a challenge both to the lady's father 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 87 
 
 and her betrothed, which was accepted by the latter. 
 At the Oarouge, a suburb of Geneva, the meeting took 
 place on the morning of August 28, 1864. Lassalle 
 was mortally wounded, and died on the 31st of the 
 same month. In spite of such a foolish ending, his 
 funeral was that of a martyr, and by many of his 
 adherents he has since been regarded with feelings 
 almost of religious devotion. 
 
 How the career of Lassalle might have shaped itself 
 in the. new Germany under the system of universal 
 suffrage which was adopted only three years after his 
 death, is an interesting subject of speculation. He 
 could not have remained inactive, and he certainly 
 would not have been hindered by doctrinaire scruples 
 from playing an effective part, even though it were by 
 some kind of alliance with the Government. His ambi- 
 tion and his energy were alike boundless. In the hey- 
 day of his passion for Fraulein von Donniges his dream 
 was to be installed as the President of the German 
 Eepublic with her elevated by his side. As it was, his 
 position at his death was rapidly becoming difficult and 
 even untenable ; he was involved in a net of prosecu- 
 tions which were fast closing round him. He would 
 soon have had no alternative but exile or a prolonged 
 imprisonment. 
 
 Lassalle was undoubtedly a man of the most extra- 
 ordinary endowments. The reader of his works feels 
 that he is in the presence of a mind of a very high order. 
 Both in his works and in his life we find an exceptional 
 combination of gifts, philosophic power, eloquence, 
 enthusiasm, practical energy, a dominating force of will.- 
 
88 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Born of a cosmopolitan race, whicli has produced so 
 many men little trammelled by the conventionalism of 
 the old European societies, he was to a remarkable 
 degree original and free from social prejudice ; was one 
 of the men, in whom the spirit of daring initiative is to 
 a remarkable degree active. He had in fact a revolu- 
 tionary temperament, disciplined by the study of 
 German philosophy, by the sense of the greatness of 
 Prussia's historic mission, and by a considerable measure 
 of practical insight, for in this he was not by any means 
 wanting. In Marx we see the same temperament, only 
 in his case it was stronger, more solid, self-restrained, 
 matured by wider reflection, and especially by the study 
 of the economic development of Europe, continued for a 
 period of forty years. 
 
 But on the whole Lassalle was a vis intemperaia.. 
 He was deficient in sober-mindedness, self-control, and 
 in that saving gift of common sense, without which 
 the highest endowments may be unprofitable and even 
 hurtful to their possessors and to the world. His 
 ambitions were not pure ; he had a histrionic as well 
 as a revolutionary temperament. He was lacking also 
 in self-respect; above all he had not sufficient 
 reverence for the great and sacred cause of which he 
 had become the champion, a cause which is fitted to 
 claim the highest motives, the purest ambitions, the 
 most noble enthusiasms. His vanity, his want of self- 
 restraint, his deficient sense of the seriousness of his 
 mission as a social -democratic leader, in these we see 
 the failings that proved his undoing. Throughout the 
 miserable intrigue in which he met his death a simple 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 89 
 
 straightforward sense of what was right and becoming 
 would at once have saved him from ruin. Yet he was 
 privileged to inaugurate a great movement. As the 
 founder of the social-democracy of Germany, he has 
 earned a place on the rdle of historic names. He 
 possessed in a notable degree the originality, energy, 
 and sympathy which fit a man to be the champion of 
 a new cause. 
 
 We may go farther and say that at that date Ger- 
 many had only two men, whose insight into the facts 
 and tendencies of their time was adequate to the occa- 
 sion — Bismarck and Lassalle. The former represented 
 a historic cause, which was ready for action, the re- 
 generation and unification of Germany to be accom- 
 plished by the Prussian army. The cause which 
 Lassalle brought to the front was at a very dififerent 
 stage of progress. The working men, its promoters 
 and representatives, and Lassalle, its champion, had 
 not attained to anything like clearness either as to the 
 end to be gained or the means for accomplishing it.. 
 It was only at the crudest and most confused initial 
 stage. 
 
90 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 TI. Theories of Lassalle 
 
 The socialistic position of Lassalle may generally be 
 described as similar to that of Rodbertus and Karl Marx. 
 He admits his indebtedness to both of those writers, 
 but at the same time he cannot be regarded as a disciple 
 of either of them. Lassalle himself was a thinker of 
 great original power ; he had his own way of conceiving 
 and expressing the historic socialism. 
 
 Lassalle supplies the key to his general position in 
 the preface to his Bastiat-Bchuhe, when quoting from 
 his System of Acquired Bights, he says : ' In social 
 matters the world is confronted with the question 
 whether now when property in the direct utilisation of 
 another man no longer exists, such property in his in- 
 direct exploitation should continue — that is, whether 
 the free realisation and development of our labour-force 
 should be the exclusive private property of the pos- 
 sessor of capital, and whether the employer as such, and 
 apart from the remuneration of his intellectual labour, 
 should be permitted to appropriate the result of other 
 men's labour.'* This sentence, he says, contains the 
 programme of a national-economic work, which he in- 
 tended to write under the title, Outlines of a Scientific 
 National Ecoimmy. In this sentence ako, we need not 
 say, the fundamental position of socialism is implied. 
 He was about to carry out his project when the Leipsic 
 Central Committee brought the question before him in a 
 * Bastiat-Schuhe, p. Hi., Berlin, 1878. 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 91 
 
 practical form. The agitation broke out and left him 
 no leisure for such a work. But he had often lamented 
 that the exposition of the theory had not preceded the 
 practical agitation, and that a scientific basis had not 
 been provided for it. 
 
 The Bastiat-Schulze was itself a controversial work, 
 written to meet the needs of the hour; Lassalle has 
 never given a full and systematic exposition of his 
 socialistic theory. All his social-economic writings 
 were published as the crises of his agitation seemed to 
 demand. But, as he himself says, they compensate 
 -by the life and incisiveness of the polemical form of 
 treatment for what they lose in systematic value. We 
 may add that it is often a scientific gain, for in the 
 career of Lassalle we see socialism confronted with fact, 
 and thereby to a large extent saved from the absolute- 
 ness, abstractness, and deficient sense of reality which 
 detract so much from the value of the works of Marx 
 and Rodbertus. The excessive love of system so charac- 
 teristic of Gea-man theorists may be as remote from 
 historic reality and possibility as the Utopian schemes 
 of French socialists. It is, however, also a natural 
 result of Lassalle's mode of presentation that he is not 
 always consistent with himself either on practical or 
 theoretical questions, especially in his attitude towards 
 the Prussian State. 
 
 On the whole, we can most clearly and comprehen- 
 sively bring out the views of Lassalle if we follow the 
 order in which they are presented in his three leading 
 works, the Working Men's Programme, the 0;pen Letter, 
 and the Bastiat-Schulze.. 
 
92 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 The central theme of the Worhing Men's Programme 
 is the vocation of the worhing class as the makers and 
 representatives of a new era in the history of the world. 
 We have seen that Lassalle's System of Acquired Rights 
 was an application of the historical method to legal 
 ideas and institutions. In his social-economic writings 
 we find the application of the same method to economic 
 facts and institutions. Tlie Working Men's Programme 
 is a brilliant example of the historical method, and 
 indeed is a lucid review of the economic development 
 of Europe, culminating in the working men's state, the 
 full-grown democracy. In the mediaeval world the 
 owners of land controlled politics, the army, law, and 
 taxation in their own interest, while labour was oppressed 
 and despised. The present regime of the capitalist 
 classes is due to a gradual process of development con- 
 tinued for centuries, and is the product of many forces 
 which have acted and reacted on each other : the in- 
 vention of the mariner's compass and of gunpowder ; 
 abroad the discovery of America and of the sea-route to 
 India ; at home, the overthrow of the feudal houses by 
 a central government, which established a regular 
 justice, security of property, and better means of com- 
 munication. This was to be followed in time by the 
 development of machinery, like the cotton-spinning 
 machine of Arkwright, itself the living embodiment of 
 the industrial and economic revolution, which was des- 
 tined to produce a corresponding political change. The 
 new machinery, the large industry, the division of 
 labour, cheap goods, and the world-market — ^these were 
 all parts of an organic whole. Production in mass 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 93 
 
 made cheap goods possible; the cheapening of com- 
 modities called forth a wider market, and the wider 
 market led to a suU larger production. 
 
 The rulers of the industrial world, the capitalists, 
 became the rulers also of the political ; the French 
 Revolution was merely a proclamation of a mighty fact 
 which had already established itself in the most ad- 
 vanced portions of Europe. But the marvellous en- 
 thusiasm of the Revolution was kindled by the fact 
 that its champions at the time represented the cause of 
 humanity. Before long, however, it became manifest 
 that the new rulers fought for the interests of a class, 
 the bourgeoisie ; and another class, that of the prole- 
 tariat, or unpropertied workers, began to define itself 
 in opposition to them. Like their predecessors, the 
 bourgeoisie wielded the legal and political power for 
 their own selfish ends. They made wealth the test and 
 basis of political and social right ; they established a 
 restricted franchise; shackled the free expression of 
 opinion by cautions and taxes on newspapers, and threw 
 the burden of taxation on the working-classes. 
 
 We have seen that the development of the middle- 
 class was a slow and gradual process, the complex 
 result of a complex mass of forces. Considering that 
 the special theme of The Working-men's Programme is 
 the historical function of the working-class, it is cer- 
 tainly a most serious defect of Lassalle's exposition that 
 he says so little of the causes which have conditioned 
 the development of the working-class as the represen- 
 tatives of a new era. Their appearance on the pages of 
 Lassalle as the supporters of a great r61e is far too sudden. 
 
94 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 On the 24th of February, 1848, he says, broke the 
 first dawn of a new historical period. On that day in 
 France a revolution broke out, which called a workman 
 into the Provisional Government ; which declared the 
 aim of the State to be the improvement of the lot of 
 the working-class ; and which proclaimed direct and 
 universal suffrage, whereby every citizen who had 
 attained the age of twenty-one should, without regard 
 to property, have an equal share in all political activity. 
 The working-class were therefore destined to be the 
 rulers and makers of a new society. But the rule of 
 the working-class had this enormous difference from 
 other forms of class rule, that it admits of no special 
 privilege. 
 
 We are all workers, in so far as we have the will in 
 any way to make ourselves useful to the human society. 
 The working-class is therefore identical with the whole 
 human race. Its cause is in truth the cause of entire 
 humanity, its freedom is the freedom of humanity itself, 
 its rule is the rule of all. 
 
 The formal means of realising this is direct universal 
 suffrage, which is no magic wand, but which at least 
 can rectify its own mistakes. It is the lance which 
 heals the wounds itself has made. Under universal 
 suffrage the legislature is the true mirror of the people 
 that has chosen it, reflecting its defects, but its progress 
 also, for which it affords unlimited expression and 
 development. 
 
 The people must therefore always regard direct 
 universal suffrage as its indispensable political weapon, 
 as the most fundamental and weightiest of its demands. 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 95 
 
 And we need not fear that they will abuse their power ; 
 for while the position and interests of the old privileged 
 classes became inconsistent with the general progress 
 of humanity, the mass of the people must know that 
 their interests can be advanced only by promoting the 
 good of their whole class. Even a very moderate sense 
 of their own welfare must teach them that each indi- 
 vidual can separately do very little to improve his 
 condition. They can prevail only by union. Thus 
 their personal interest, instead of being opposed to the 
 movement of history, coincides with the development 
 of the whole people and is in harmony with freedom, 
 culture, and the highest ideas of our time. 
 
 This masterly treatise of Lassalle concludes with an 
 appeal to the working-class, in which we see the great 
 agitator reach the high level of a pure and noble 
 eloquence. Having shown at length that the working- 
 class are called to be the creators and representatives 
 of a new historical era, he proceeds : ' From what we 
 have said there follows for all who belong to the work- 
 ing-class the duty of an entirely new bearing. 
 
 ' Nothing is more suited to stamp on a class a worthy 
 and deeply moral impress than the consciousness that 
 it is called to be the ruling class, that it is appointed 
 to raise its principle to be the principle of an entire 
 epoch, to make its idea the ruling idea of the whole 
 society, and so again to mould society after its own 
 pattern. The high world-historic honour of this voca- 
 tion must occupy all your thoughts. The vices of the 
 oppressed, the idle amusements of the thoughtless, and 
 the harmless frivolity of the unimportant beseem you 
 
96 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 no longer. Ye are the rock on whioli the church of 
 the future should be built.' 
 
 Pity that in the miserable squabble which terminated 
 his life he did not realise that the leader of the work- 
 ing-class should also be inspired by a sense of the 
 nobility of his calling. 
 
 This exposition of the vocation of the working- 
 class is closely connected with another notable feature 
 of Lassalle's teaching, .his Theory of the State. Lassalle's 
 theory of the State differs entirely from that generally 
 held by the Liberal school. The Liberal school hold 
 that the function of the State consists simply in pro- 
 tecting the personal freedom and the property of the 
 individual. This he scouts as a night-watchman's idea, 
 because it conceives the State under the image of a 
 night-watchman, whose sole function it is to prevent 
 robbery and burglary. 
 
 In opposition to this narrow idea of the State Lassalle 
 quotes approvingly the view of August Boeckh : ' That' 
 we must widen our notion of the State so as to believe 
 that the State is the institution in which the whole 
 virtue of humanity should be realised.' 
 
 -History, Lassalle tells us, is an incessant struggle 
 with Nature, with the misery, ignorance, poverty, weak- 
 ness, and unfreedom in which the human race was 
 originally placed.* The progressive victory over this 
 weakness, that is the development of the freedom 
 which history depicts. 
 
 In this struggle, if the individual had been left to 
 himself, he could have made no progress. The State it 
 * See Worhing-men's Programms. 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 97 
 
 is which has the function to accomplish this develop- 
 ment of freedom, this development of the human race 
 in the way of freedom. The duty of the State is to 
 enable the individual to reach a sum of culture, power, 
 and freedom, which for individuals would be absolutely 
 unattainable. The aim of the State is to bring human 
 nature to positive unfolding and progressive develop- 
 ment — ^in other words, to realise the chief end of man : 
 it is the education and development of the human race 
 in the way of freedom. 
 
 The State should be the complement of the individual. 
 It must be ready to offer a helping hand, wherever and 
 whenever individuals are unable to realise the happi- 
 ness, freedom and culture which befit a human being. 
 
 Save the State, that primitive vestal fire of culture, 
 from the modern barbarians, he exclaims on another 
 occasion. 
 
 To these political conceptions Lassalle is true through- 
 out. It certainly is a nobler and more rational ideal 
 of the State than the once prevalent Manchester theory. 
 When we descend from theory to practice all obviously 
 depends on what kind of State we have got, and on the 
 circumstances and conditions under which it is called 
 upon to act. 
 
 That the State should, through its various organs, 
 support and develop individual effort, calling it forth, 
 rendering it hopeful and effectual, never weakening the 
 springs of it, but stimulating and completing it, is a 
 position which most thinkers would now accept. And 
 most will admit with regret that the existing State is 
 too much a -great taxing and fighting machine. The 
 
 7 
 
9^ A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 field of inquiry here opened up is a wide and tempting 
 one, on which we cannot now enter. We are at present 
 concerned with the fact that the State-help contem- 
 plated by Lassalle was meant not only to leave the 
 individual free, but to further him in the free realisa- 
 tion of himself. 
 
 The Iron Law of Wages may well be described as 
 the key to Lassalle's social-economic position. It holds ' 
 the same prominent place in his system of thinking as 
 the theory of surplus value does in that of Marx. 
 Both, it may be added, are only different aspects of the 
 same fact. Lassalle insists chiefly on the small share 
 of the produce of labour which goes to the labourer ; 
 Marx traces the history of the share, called surplus 
 value, which goes to the capitalist. 
 
 Lassalle's most careful statement of the Iron Law, to 
 which he frequently recurs in subsequent writings, is 
 contained in his Open Letter (p. 13). 'The Iron 
 Economic Law, which, in existing circumstances, under 
 the law of supply and demand for labour, determines 
 the wage, is this: that the average wage always 
 remains reduced to the necessary provision w;hich, 
 according to the customary standard of living, is 
 required for subsistence and for propagation. This is 
 the point about which the real wage continually 
 oscillates, without ever being able long to rise above it 
 or to fall below it. It cannot permanently rise above 
 this average level, because in consequence of the easier 
 and better condition of the workers there would be an 
 increase of marriages and births among them, an 
 increase of the working population and thereby of the 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 99 
 
 supply of labour, whicli would bring the wage down to 
 its previous level or even below it. On the other 
 hand, the wage cannot permanently fall below this 
 necessary subsistence, because then occur emigration, 
 abstinence from marriage, and, lastly, a diminution of 
 the number of workmen caused by their misery, which 
 lessens the supply of labour, and therefore once more 
 raises the wage to its previous rate.' 
 
 On a nearer consideration, Lassalle goes on to say 
 the effect' of the Iron Law is as follows : — 
 
 ' From the produce of labour so much is taken and 
 distributed among the workmen as is required for their 
 subsistence. 
 
 'The entire surplus of production falls to the 
 capitalist. It is therefore a result of the Iron Law that 
 the workman is necessarily excluded from the benefits 
 of an increasing production, from the increased produc- 
 tivity of his own labour.' * 
 
 Such is Lassalle's theory of the Iron Law of Wages. 
 He accepts it as taught by Eicardo and the economists 
 of the orthodox school in England, France and 
 Germany. We. believe that his statement of it is 
 substantially just and accurate; that it fairly reflects 
 the economic science of his time, and, under the then 
 prevailing economic conditions, may be described as a 
 valid law. 
 
 Lassalle held that the customary standard of living 
 
 and the operation of the law generally were subject 
 
 to variation. Still it may reasonably be maintained that 
 
 he has not sufficiently considered the fact that, like 
 
 * See Opera Letter. 
 
loo A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 capital, the Iron Law of Wages is an historical category. 
 He has not overlooked the fact, and could hardly do so, 
 as the Iron Law is an implicate and result of the 
 domination of capital. But his method of exposition is 
 too much the controversial one, of pressing ib as an 
 argumentum ad hoviinem against his opponents in 
 Germany, and, as usual, in controversy truth is liable 
 to suffer. It may therefore be argued that under the 
 competitive system as now existing, changes have 
 occurred which render Lassalle's theory of the Iron Law 
 inaccurate and untenable. Even while the present 
 system continues to prevail, the law may undergo very 
 extensive modification through the progress of education 
 and organisation among the workmen, and through the 
 general advance of society in morality and enlightenment. 
 The question of modification of the Iron Law is one of 
 degree, and it may fairly be contended by critics of 
 Lassalle that he has not recognised it to a sufficient 
 degree. 
 
 On the other hand, it may also be rationally 
 maintained that in so far as education and organisation 
 prevail among the workmen, in so far does capitalism, 
 with all its conditions and implicates, tend to be super- 
 seded. Trades Unions, Co-operative Societies, Factory 
 Legislation, are all forms of the social control of 
 economic processes, inconsistent with competitive 
 economics. The more they gain ground, the more does 
 capitalism break up and disappear. From this higher 
 point of view, we may fairly contend that considerations 
 which have been urged as destructive of Lassalle's 
 argument are really symptoms of the decline of 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE loi 
 
 capitalism. The Iron Law is an inevitable result of the 
 historical conditions contemplated by Lassalle. These 
 conditions have changed, but the change means that 
 capitalism is passing away. We are thus thrown back 
 on the wider question, whether capitalism is disappear- 
 ing, a question which it would at present be premature 
 to discuss. 
 
 In any case the position of Lassalle is perfectly 
 clear. He accepted the orthodox political economy in 
 order to show that the inevitable operation of its laws 
 left no hope for the working-class ; and that no remedy 
 could be found but by abolishing the conditions in 
 which those laws have their validity — in other words, 
 by abolishing the present relations of labour and 
 capital altogether. The great aim of his agitation was 
 to bring forward a scheme which would strike at the 
 root of the evil. The remedy for the evil condition of 
 things connected with the Iron Law of wages is to 
 secure the workmen the full produce of their labour, by 
 combining the functions of workmen and capitalists 
 through the establishment of productive associations. 
 The distinction between labourer and capitalist is 
 thereby abolished. The workman becomes producer, 
 and for remuneration receives the entire produce of his 
 labour. 
 
 The associations founded by Schulze-Delitzsch, 
 Lassalle went on to argue, would effect no substantial 
 improvement in the condition of the working-class. 
 The unions for the supply of credit and raw materials 
 do not benefit the working-class as such, but only 
 the small hand-workers. But hand-labour is an 
 
I02 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 antiquated form of industry, which is destined to 
 succumb before the large industry equipped with 
 machinery and an adequate capital. To provide hand- 
 labour with the means of continuing their obsolete 
 trades is only to prolong the agony of an assured 
 defeat. 
 
 The consumers' unions, or co-operative stores as we 
 call them in England, also fail, because they do not 
 help the workman at the point where he needs it most, 
 as producers. Before the seller, as before the policeman, 
 all men are equal ; the only thing the seller cares for is 
 that his customers are able to pay. In discussing the 
 Iron Law, we saw that the workman must be helped as 
 producer — that is, in securing a better share of his 
 product. The consumers' unions may indeed give a 
 restricted and temporary relief. So long as the unions 
 include only a limited number of workmen, they afford 
 relief by cheapening the means of subsistence, inasmuch 
 as they do not lower the general rate of wages. But in 
 proportion as the unions embrace the entire working- 
 class and thereby cause a general cheapening of the 
 means of subsistence, the Iron Law of wages will take 
 effect. For the average wage is only the expression in 
 money of the customary means of subsistence. The 
 average wage will fall in proportion to the genenal 
 cheapening of the means of subsistence, and all the 
 pains taken by the workmen in founding and conduct- 
 ing the consumers' unions will be labour lost. They 
 will only enable tbe workman to subsist on a smaller 
 wage. 
 
 The only effectual way to improve the condition of 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 103 
 
 the working-class is through the free individual 
 association of the workers, by its application and 
 extension to the great industry. The working-class 
 must be its own capitalist. 
 
 But when the workmen on the one hand contemplate 
 the enormous sums required for railways and factories, 
 and on the other hand consider the emptiness of their 
 own pockets, they may naturally ask where they are to 
 obtain the capital needed for the great industry ? The 
 State alone can furnish it; and the State ought to 
 furnish it, because it is, and always has been, the duty of 
 the State to promote and facilitate the great progressive 
 movements of civilisation. Productive association, ivith 
 State credit was the plan of Lassalle.* 
 
 The State had already in numerous instances 
 guaranteed its credit for industrial undertakings by 
 which the rich classes had benefited — canals, postal 
 services, banks, agricultural improvements, and 
 especially with regard to railways. No outcry of 
 socialism or communism had been raised against this 
 form of State help? Then why raise it when the 
 greatest problem of modern civilisation was involved — 
 the improvement of the lot of the working classes? 
 Lassalle's estimate was, that the loan of a hundred 
 million thalers would be more than sufficient to bring 
 the principle of association into full movement through 
 out the kingdom of Prussia. 
 
 Obviously the money required for the promotion of 
 productive associations did not require to be actually 
 paid by the Government ; only the State guarantee for 
 * See Open Letter, passim. 
 
104 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 the loan was necessary. The State would see that 
 proper rules for the associations should be made and 
 observed by them. It would reserve to itself the rights 
 of a creditor or sleeping partner. It would generally 
 take care that the funds be put to their legitimate use. 
 But its control would not pass beyond those reasonable 
 limits : the associations would be free ; they would 
 be the voluntary act of the working men themselves. 
 Above all, the State, thus supporting and controlling 
 the associations, would be a democratic State, elected 
 by universal suffrage, the organ of the workers, 
 who form an overwhelming majority of every com- 
 munity. 
 
 But if we are to conceive the matter in the crudest 
 way and consider the money as actually paid, wherein 
 would the enormity of such a transaction consist? 
 The State had spent hundreds of millions in war, to 
 appease the wounded vanity of royal mistresses, to 
 satisfy the lust of conquest of princes, to open up 
 markets for the middle classes ; yet when the deliver- 
 ance of humanity is concerned the money cannot be 
 procured ! 
 
 Further, as he takes care to explain, Lassalle did not 
 propose his scheme of productive associations as the 
 solution of the social question. The solution of the 
 social question would demand generations. He pro- 
 posed his scheme as the means of transition, as the 
 easiest and mildest means of transition.* It was the 
 germ, the organic principle of an incessant development. 
 Lassalle has indicated, though only in vague outline, 
 * See Bastiat-Schuhe, p. 189. 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 105 
 
 how such an organic development of productive asso- 
 ciations should proceed. They would begin in populous 
 centres, in cases where the nature of the industry, and 
 the voluntary inclination of the workmen to association, 
 would facilitate their formation. Industries, which are 
 mutually dependent and work into each other's hands, 
 would be united by a credit union ; and there would fur- 
 ther be an insurance union, embracing the different asso- 
 ciations, which would reduce their losses to a minimum. 
 The risks would be greatly lessened, as a speculative 
 industry, constantly tending to anarchy, and all the 
 evils of competition would be superseded by an organised 
 industry; over-production would give place to pro- 
 duction in advance. In this way the associations would 
 grow until they embraced the entire industry of the 
 country. And the general application of the principle 
 would give an enormous advantage in international 
 competition to the country adopting it, for it would be 
 rational, systematic, and in every way more effective and 
 economical. 
 
 The goal of the whole development, as conceived by 
 Lassalle, was a collectivism of the same type as that 
 contemplated by Marx and Rodbertus. 'Division of 
 labour,' he says, ' is really common labour, social 
 combination for production. This, the real nature 
 of production, needs only to be explicitly recognised. 
 In the total production, therefore, it is merely re- 
 quisite to abolish individual portions of capital, and 
 to conduct the labour of society, which is already 
 common, with the common capital of society, and 
 to distribute the result of. production, among all who 
 
io6 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 have contributed to it, in proportion to their perform- 
 ance.' * 
 
 In the controversial work against Schulze-Delitzsch, 
 Lassalle has at greater length expounded his general 
 position in opposition to the individualist theories of 
 his opponents. He contends that progress has not pro- 
 ceeded from the individual ; it has always proceeded 
 from the community. In this connection he sums up 
 briefly the history of social development. 
 
 The entire ancient world, and also the whole mediaeval 
 period down to the French Revolution of 1789, sought 
 human solidarity and community in bondage or sub- 
 jection. 
 
 The French Eevolution of 1789, and the historical 
 period controlled by it, rightly incensed at this sub- 
 jection, sought freedom in the dissolution of all solidarity 
 and commurJty. Thereby, however, it gained, not 
 freedom, but license. Because freedom without com- 
 munity is license. 
 
 The new, the present period, seeks soKdarity in 
 freedom. t He then proceeds in his theory qf conjunctures 
 to prove that, instead of each man being economically 
 responsible for what he has done, each man is really 
 reponsible for what he has not done. The economic 
 fate of the individual is determined by circumstances 
 over which he has no control, or very little. What does 
 Lassalle mean by a conjuncture ? We can best under- 
 stand it by reference to a great economic crisis which 
 has occurred since his time. No better example of a 
 conjwmture can be found than in the recent history 
 * BastiaUSchuke, p. 188. + Ihid., p. 18. 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 107 
 
 of British agriculture. In 1876, agriculture, still the 
 most important industry of the country, began to be 
 seriously threatened by American competition. The 
 crisis caused by the low prices due to this competition 
 was greatly aggravated by bad seasons, such as that of 
 1879. The farmers, obliged to pay rent out of capital, 
 were many of them ruined. In consequence of the 
 diminished application of capital to land the opportunities 
 of labour were greatly lessened. Rents could no longer 
 be paid as formerly. All three classes directly con- 
 cerned in English agriculture suffered fearfully, without 
 any special individual responsibility in the matter. In 
 Ireland, where the diflficulty, great in itself, was intensi- 
 fied by the national idea, an economic crisis grew into a 
 great political and imperial crisis. In the eyes of the 
 impartial inquirer, who of all the millions of sufferers 
 was personally responsible ? 
 
 Such wide-spread disasters are common in recent 
 economic history. They are a necessary result of a com- 
 petitive system of industry. Lassalle is justly angry with 
 the one-sided and ill-instructed economists that would 
 hold the individual responsible for his fate in such a crisis. 
 Statesmen little understand their duty who would leave 
 their subjects without help in these times of distress. 
 And it must always be a praiseworthy feature of 
 socialism that it seeks to establish social control of 
 these conjunctures as far as possible, and to minimise 
 their disastrous effects by giving social support to those 
 menaced by them. 
 
 The main burden of the Bastiat-Schulze is Lassalle's 
 account of capital and labour. 
 
io8 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 For Lassalle capital is a historic category, a product 
 of historical circumstances, the rise of which we can 
 trace, the disappearance of which, under altered circum- 
 stances, we can foresee. 
 
 In other words, capital is the name for a system of 
 economic, social, and legal conditions, which are the 
 result severally and collectively of a long and gradual 
 process of historical development. The Bastiat-Schulze 
 is an elucidation of these conditions. The following 
 may be taken as a general statement of them : — 
 
 (i) The division of labour in connection with 
 the large industry. 
 
 (2) A system of production for exchange in the 
 great world markets. 
 
 (3) Free competition. 
 
 (4) The instruments of labour, the property of 
 a special class, who after paying 
 
 (5) A class of free labourers in accordance with 
 the iron law of wages, pocket the surplus value. 
 Property consists not in the fruit of one's own 
 labour, but in the appropriation of that of others, 
 Eigenthum ist frerndthiom geworden.* 
 
 In this way capital has become an independent, 
 active, and self-generating power which oppresses its 
 producer. Money makes money. The labour of the past, 
 appropriated and capitalised, crushes the labour of the 
 present. ' The dead captures the living.' ' The instru- 
 ment of labour, which has become independent, and has 
 exchanged rSles with the workmen, which has degraded 
 the living workmen to a dead instrument of labour, and 
 * Bastiat-Schuhe, p. 186. 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 109 
 
 has developed itself, the dead instrument of labour into 
 the living organ of production — that is capital.'* In 
 such highly metaphorical language does Lassalle sum up 
 his history of capital. We have already commented on 
 that aspect of it, the iron law of wages, which Lassalle 
 has most emphasised. The whole subject is much 
 more comprehensively treated in the Capital of Karl 
 Marx ; therefore we need not dwell upon it further at 
 present. 
 
 It will not be wrong, however, to say a word here 
 about the use of the word capital, as current in the 
 school of socialists to which Lassalle and Marx belong. 
 It is not applied by them in its purely economic sense, 
 as wealth utilised for further production : it is used as 
 the name of the social and economic system in which 
 the owners of capital are the dominant power. With 
 them it is the economic factor as operating under the 
 existing legal and social conditions, with all these con- 
 ditions clinging to it. It would be much better to 
 restrict the word to its proper economic use, and employ 
 the new word capitalism as a fairly accurate name for 
 the existing system. 
 
 The function of capital under all social systems and 
 at all historical epochs is fundamentally the same ; it is 
 simply wealth used for the production of more wealth. 
 But the historical, legal, and political conditions under 
 which it is utilised vary indefinitely, as do also the 
 technical forms in which it is embodied. 
 
 No real excuse can be offered for the ignorance or 
 confusion of language of controversialists who maintain 
 * Bastiat-Schuke, p. i8l. 
 
no A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 that the object of socialism is to abolish capital. So far 
 from abolishing capital, socialists wish to make it still 
 more effective for social wellbeing by placing it under 
 social control. What they wish to abolish is the exist- 
 ing system, in which capital is under the control of a 
 class. It would be a considerable gain in clearness if 
 this system were always called capitalism. 
 
 "We have already remarked upon Lassalle's theoiy of 
 the State, and his treatment of the iron law of wages. 
 Our further criticism of his social economic position can 
 best be brought out by reference to his controversy with 
 Schulze-Delitzsch, the economic representative of Ger- 
 man Liberalism. 
 
 In general it may be said that Lassalle meets the 
 one-sided individualism of Schulze by a statement of 
 the socialistic theory, which is also one-sided and ex- 
 aggerated. His view of the influence of the community 
 as compared with that of the individual is the most 
 prominent example of this. The only accurate social 
 philosophy is one which gives due attention to both 
 factors; both are of supreme importance, and either 
 may fitly be the starting-point of investigation and 
 discussion. 
 
 His theory of conjunctures is overstated. It is to a 
 considerable degree well-founded ; in the great economic 
 storms which sweep over the civilised world the fate 
 of the individual is largely determined by conditions 
 over which he has no. control. Yet now as ever the 
 homely virtues of industry, energy, sobriety, and pru- 
 dence do materially determine the individual career. 
 Tor our present purpose, however, it is more important 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE iii 
 
 to consider Lassalle's polemic against the practical pro- 
 posals of his opponent. Lassalle contended that the 
 unions for providing credit and raw material would 
 benefit the hand-workers only, whereas hand labour is 
 destined to disappear before the large industry. But, 
 we may ask, why should not such methods of mutual 
 help be utilised for associations of working men even 
 more than for isolated workers ? Co-operative stores 
 may be regarded as affording only a very partial and 
 limited relief to the workmen, but why should the 
 principle of association among workmen stop there ? 
 The system of voluntary co-operation must begin some- 
 where ; it began most naturally and reasonably with the 
 co-operative store, and it proceeds most naturally and 
 reasonably along the line of least resistance to further 
 development. In the co-operative stores the workmen 
 have been acquiring the capital and experience neces- 
 sary for further progress. No limit can be assigned to 
 the possible evolution of the system. If in the contro- 
 versial struggle Lassalle had listened to the clear voice 
 of science, he would have seen that, for his opponent as 
 well as for himself, he must maintain that all social 
 institutions are subject to and capable of development. 
 For the methods of Schulze it may be claimed that 
 they do not provide a ready-made solution of the social 
 question, but they are a beginning. For the associations 
 of Schulze, not less than for those of Lassalle, we may 
 contend that they supply the organic principle of an 
 incessant development. In this way the workmen may 
 attain to the complete management of their own indus- 
 trial interests with their own joint capital. They may 
 
112 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 thus obtain for themselves the full product of their 
 labour, in which case the objection of Lassalle, that the 
 increase of population, under the influence of the cheap 
 provisions supplied by the stores, would no more apply to' 
 the scheme of Schulze than they would to his own. In 
 both cases we are to suppose that the means of subsist- 
 ence would be more abundant and more easily obtained ; 
 in both cases there might be the risk of a too rapidly 
 increasing population. We may suppose that this 
 increase of population would be met by a still greater 
 increase in the product of labour, all going to the 
 workers. But for the schemes of Schulze there would 
 be this great advantage that, the capital and experience 
 of the workers having been acquired by their own exer- 
 tions, they would have all the superior training requisite 
 for the solution of the population question, and all other 
 questions, which can be obtained only from a long course 
 of social discipline. 
 
 Lassalle would have done well to remember his own 
 statement, that the only real point of difierence between 
 them was, that one believed in State help, and the 
 other in 'self-help.' And we may further ask. Do 
 the two exclude each other ? 
 
 In fact, the controversy, considered purely on its 
 merits, was barren enough. Yet it led to profitable 
 results, inasmuch as it directed the mind of Germany 
 to the questions involved, and led to a more thorough 
 discussion of them. 
 
 Better, however, than any argument which can be 
 urged is the verdict of history on the merits of the 
 question, as already pronounced during the period 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 113 
 
 which has elapsed since the date of the controversy. 
 In 1885, just twenty-one years after the bitter con- 
 troversy between the two representatives of State-help 
 and self-help, the societies established by Schulze in 
 Germany alone possessed one hundred million thalers 
 of capital of their own. If the workmen fail in produc- 
 tive association, it will not be, as Lassalle maintained, 
 for want of capital. Productive association with State 
 credit is therefore not the only way out of the wilder- 
 ness. 
 
 Must we go farther and say that Lassalle's method 
 of State help was not the right method at all ? It is 
 certain, that the Government of Germany, though 
 organised on the principle of universal suffrage, has not 
 granted the credit demanded by Lassalle, and that his 
 agitation in this matter has failed owing, it might be 
 alleged, to his early death, and to the fact that since his 
 time German socialism has prematurely moved on inter- 
 national, and even anti-national, lines, thus alienating 
 from itself the sympathies of the Emperor and his Chan- 
 cellor. We need not say how very improbable it is that 
 the German Government would have guaranteed its 
 credit, however submissive and conciliatory the attitude 
 of the social democrats might have been. The social 
 democrats themselves, though they gave a place to 
 Lassalle's scheme on their programme, seem now dis- 
 posed to attach little importance to it. In short, Las- 
 salle's agitation has in the point immediately in question 
 been a failure. At the same time, it would be absolutely 
 incorrect to assert that experience has pronounced 
 
 8 
 
ri4 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 against his scheme, inasmuch as no Government has 
 ever seriously taken it in hand. 
 
 Like many other pioneers, Lassalle has not accom- 
 plished what he intended, yet he has achieved great 
 results. We cannot quite accept the dictum of Schiller, 
 that the- world's history is the world's judgment. We 
 are not prepared to believe that all things that have suc- 
 ceeded were good, and all things that have failed were 
 evil ; or that things are good or evil only in so far as they 
 succeed or fail. Still, we may well sum up the contro- 
 versy between Lassalle and Schulze by stating that in 
 1885 the societies founded by the latter had in Germany 
 a membership of 1,500,000 with a capital of ;£' 15,000,000, 
 and at the last election, in 1 890, the social democracy of 
 Germany, originated by Lassalle, polled 1,429,000 votes. 
 Both have done great things, which are destined to be 
 greater still. In this, as in so many other instances, 
 the course of history has not respected the narrow 
 limits prescribed to it by controversialists. 
 
 We need not, however, insist further on the details 
 of Lassalle's controversy with Schulze-Delitzsch. Much 
 more important is it to recall the leading aspects of his 
 teaching. What Lassalle contemplated and contended 
 for was a democracy in which the claims of Might and 
 Eight should be reconciled, a democracy of working 
 men, guided by science, and through universal suflfrage 
 constituting a State, which would rise to the high level 
 of its function as representative and promoter of free- 
 dom, culture, morality and progress in the fullest and 
 deepest significance of those great ideas. Above 
 
FERDINAND LASSALLE 115 
 
 all, this democracy was to be a social democracy, in 
 wMcli the political ideal should be subordinate to the 
 social ; hence the duty of the State at least to initiate 
 the solution of the social question by granting credit 
 for productive associations. But this was only to be 
 a beginning : the solution of the social question must 
 be ardently worked out for generations until labour 
 should be entirely emancipated. 
 
 With such an ideal, contrast the Prussian-German 
 State as it actually is. The German State must 
 still find its basis in the army and police, the niost 
 intelligent of the working class being in profound 
 discontent. It is a fact worth considering by our 
 economists and politicians, that the dlite of the work- 
 ing men of probably the best educated and most 
 thoughtful nation in the world have gone over to 
 the social-democratic party. Nor can the German or 
 any other State devote itself heartily to the solution 
 of the social question, for Europe is like a vast camp, 
 in which science and finance are strained to the utter- 
 most in order to devise and provide instruments for the 
 destruction of our fellow-men. Of this state of things 
 the young Emperor who lately ascended the throne is 
 only the too wilHng representative ; but ■ even if he 
 were inclined, he would be powerless to prevent it, as 
 its causes are too deeply rooted in human nature and 
 in the present stage of social development to be removed 
 by anything less than a profound change in the mo- 
 tives and conditions of life. The historical antecedents 
 and geographical position of Germany are such that it 
 
ii6 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 must long continue to be a military State ; and most 
 other nations have hindrances of their own. Eeformers 
 must therefore wait long and strive earnestly before 
 they can hope to see such an ideal realised as that of 
 Lassalle. That the ideal was a noble one, and that 
 the gratitude of all lovers of progress is due to him for 
 his eager and eloquent advocacy of it, notwithstanding 
 certain unworthy passages in his career, few will deny. 
 
OHAPTEE VI 
 
 RODBERTUS 
 
 To those who identify socialism with the extreme 
 revolutionary spirit Rodbertus is naturally an enigma. 
 Everything characteristic of Rodbertus is an express 
 contradiction of their notion of a socialist. He was a 
 Prussian lawyer and landowner, a quiet and cultured 
 student, who disliked revolution and even agitation. 
 It was a marked feature of his teaching also, that 
 he meant the socialist development to proceed on 
 national lines and under national control. Yet it is 
 impossible to give any reasonable account of socialism 
 that will exclude Rodbertus. Clearly the only right 
 way out of the dilemma for those who are caught in it 
 is to widen their conception of the subject. And Rod- 
 bertus will become perfectly clear and intelligible. 
 
 Karl Johann Rodbertus, by some considered to be 
 the founder of scientific socialism, was born at Greifs- 
 wald on rath August 1805, his father being a professor 
 at the university there. He studied law at Gottingen 
 and Berlin, thereafter engaging in various legal occu- 
 pations ; and, after travelling for some time, he bought 
 the estate of Jagetzow, in Pomerania, whence his name 
 of Rodbertus-Jagetzow. In 1836 he settled on this 
 
ii8 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 estate, and henceforward devoted his life chiefly to 
 economic and other learned studies, taking also some 
 interest in local and provincial affairs. 
 
 After the revolution of March 1848 Rodbertus was 
 elected member of the Prussian National Assembly, in 
 which body he belonged to the Left Centre ; and for 
 fourteen days he filled the post of Minister of Public 
 Worship and Education. He sat for Berlin in the Second 
 Chamber .of 1849, and moved the adoption of the Prank- 
 fort imperial constitution, which was carried. Then 
 came the failure of the Eevolutionary movement in 
 Prussia, as elsewhere in Europe, and Eodbertus retired 
 into private life. When the system of dividing the 
 Prussian electorate into three classes was adopted, Rod- 
 bertus recommended abstention from voting. His only 
 subsequent appearance in public life was his candidature 
 for the first North German Diet, in which he was defeated. 
 
 His correspondence with Lassalle was an interesting 
 feature of his life. At one time Rodbertus had some 
 intention of forming a social party with the help of 
 the conservative socialist Rudolf Meyer and of Hasen- 
 clever, a prominent follower of Lassalle ; but no pro- 
 gress was made in this. Rodbertus was neither dis- 
 posed nor qualified to be an agitator, being a man of 
 a calm and critical temperament, who believed that 
 society could not be improved by violent changes, but 
 by a long and gradual course of development. He 
 warned the working men of Germany against connect- 
 ing themselves with any political party, enjoining them 
 to be a social party pure and simple. H*e died on 8th 
 December 1875. 
 
RODBERTUS 119 
 
 The general position of Rodbertus wa.s " social, mon- 
 archical, and national." With his entire soul he held 
 the purely economic part of the creed of the German 
 social-democratic party, yet he did not agree with their 
 methods, and had no liking for the productive associ- 
 ations with State help of Lassalle. He regarded a 
 socialistic republic as a possible thing, but he cordially 
 accepted the monarchic institution in his own country, 
 and hoped that a German emperor might undertake the 
 rdle of a social emperor. He was also a true patriot, 
 and was proud and hopeful of the career that lay before 
 the regenerated empire of Germany. 
 
 The basis of the economic teaching of Rodbertus is 
 the principle laid down by Adam Smith and Ricardo, 
 and insisted on by all the later socialists, that labour is 
 the source and measure of value. In connection with 
 this he developed the position that rent, profit, and 
 wages are all parts of a national income produced by 
 the united organic labour of the workers of the commu- 
 nity. Consequently there can be no talk of the wages 
 of labour being paid out of capital ; wages is only that 
 part of the national income which is received by the 
 workmen, of a national income which they have them- 
 selves entirely produced. The wages fund theory is 
 thus summarily disposed of. 
 
 But the most important result of the theory is his 
 position that the possession of land and capital enables 
 the landholders and capitahsts to compel the workmen 
 to divide the product of their labour with those non- 
 working classes, and in such a proportion that the 
 workers only obtain as much as can support them in 
 
I20 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 life. Thus the iron law of wages is established. Hence 
 also Eodbertns deduces his theory of commercial crises 
 aud of pauperism, and in the following way : In spite 
 of the increasing productivity of labour, the workers 
 obtain in general only sufficient to support their class, 
 and therefore a smaller relative share of the national 
 income. But the prodacers form also the large mass 
 of consumers, and, with the decline of their relative 
 share in the national income, must decline the relative 
 purchasing power of this large class of the people. The 
 growing production is not met by a correspondingly 
 growing consumption ; expansion is succeeded by con- 
 traction of production, by a scarcity of employment, 
 and a further decline in purchasing power on the part 
 of the workers. Thus we have a, commercial crisis 
 bringing with it pauperism as a necessary result. In 
 the meantime the purchasing power of the non-pro- 
 ducing capitalists and landholders continues relatively 
 to increase ; but, as they have already had enough to 
 buy all the comforts of life, they spend the more 
 in the purchase of luxuries, the production of which 
 increases. 
 
 A fundamental part of the teaching of Rodbertus is 
 his theory of social development. He recognised three 
 stages in the economic progress of mankind: (i) the 
 ancient heathen period in which property in human 
 beings was the rule ; (2) the period of private property 
 in land and capital ; (3) the period, still remote, of pro- 
 perty as dependent on service or desert. The goal of 
 the human race is to be one society organised on a 
 communistic basis ; only in that way can the principle 
 
RODBERTUS 121 
 
 that every man be rewarded according to his work be 
 realised. In this communistic or socialistic state of 
 the future land and capital will be national property, 
 and the entire national production will be under national 
 control ; and means will be taken so to estimate the 
 labour of each citizen that he shall be rewarded accord- 
 ing to its precise amount. An immense staff of State 
 officials will be required for this function. As we have 
 already said, Eodbertus believed that this stage of 
 social development is yet far distant ; he thought that 
 five centuries will need to pass away before the ethical 
 force of the people can be equal to it. 
 
 Prom temperament, culture, and social position Eod- 
 bertus was averse to agitation as a means of hastening 
 the new era ; and in the measures which he recom- 
 mends for making the transition towards it he showed 
 a scrupulous regard for the existing interests of the 
 capitalists and landholders. He proposed that those 
 two classes should be left in full possession of their 
 present share of the national income, but that the 
 workers should reap the benefit of the increasing pro- 
 duction. To secure them this increment of production 
 he proposed that the State should fix a normal working 
 day for the various trades, a normal day's work, and a 
 legal wage, the amount of which should be revised 
 periodically, and raised according to the increase of 
 production, the better workman receiving a better wage. 
 By measures such as these, carried out by the State in 
 order to correct the evils of competition, would Eod- 
 bertus seek to make the transition into the socialistic 
 era. 
 
122 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 The economic work of Rodberfcus is therefore an 
 attempt made in a temperate and scientific spirit to 
 elucidate the evil tendencies inherent in the competitive 
 system, especially as exemplified in the operation of the 
 iron law of wages. The remedy he proposes is a State 
 management uf production and distribution, which shall 
 extend more and more, till we arrive at a complete and 
 universal socialism — and all based on the principle that, 
 as labour is the source of value, so to the labourer should 
 all wealth belong. 
 
 It is hardly necessary further to dwell on the 
 theories of Rodbertus. The general outlines of his 
 teaching are clear enough, and the details could be 
 properly treated only in a work specially devoted 
 to him. In some leading features his economic position 
 is the same as that of Marx and Lassalle. The chief 
 difference lies in the application of their principles. 
 We have seen that he expects the Prussian or German 
 State to adopt his theories, but the interest we can 
 have in the very remote realisation of them in this way 
 naturally cannot be very great. It was unreasonable to 
 belive that the people of Germany would make no use 
 of their newly acquired political rights to promote their 
 social claims ; and it is needless to say that a social- 
 istic evolution slowly carried out under an army of 
 officials is not a very inviting prospect. 
 
 On the recent political economy of Germany, espe- 
 cially as represented by Adolf Wagner, Rodbertus has 
 exercised a great influence. For many he is the founder 
 of a truly scientific socialism. His criticism of the 
 
RODBERTUS 123 
 
 leading principles of economics has led them to make 
 important changes in the statement and treatment of 
 their science.* 
 
 * The following are the most important works of Eodbertus : — 
 Zwr Erhenntniss unserer staatswirtJischafilichen Zustiinde (1842) ; 
 Sociale Briefe ore von Kirchmann (1850) ; Oreditnoth des Qrundhesitzes 
 (2nd ed., 1876) ; "DerNormal-arbeitstag,"ln TKb. Zeitschrift {iSjS) ; 
 Letters to A. Wagner, &o., Tiib. Zeitschrift (1878-79) ; Letters to 
 Rudolf Meyer (1882). See also Adolf Wagner {Tub. Zeitschrift 
 (1878) ; Kozak's work on Eodbertus (1882) ; and an excellent mono- 
 graph by Gr. Adler (Leipsio, 1884). 
 
OHAPTEE VII 
 
 KARL MARX 
 
 The greatest and most influential name in the. history 
 of socialism is unquestionably Karl Marx. He and his 
 like-minded companion Engels are the acknowledged 
 heads of the ' scientific and revolutionary ' school of 
 socialism, which has its representatives in almost every 
 country of the civilised world, and is generally recog- 
 nised as the most serious and formidable form of the 
 new teaching. 
 
 No authoritative biography of Marx has yet been 
 published, and we must therefore content ourselves 
 with a very meagre sketch of his life. • Like Ferdinand 
 Lassalle, he was of Jewish extraction. He was born 
 at Treves in 1818, his father being a lawyer in that 
 town ; and he studied at Berlin and Bonn, but ne- 
 glected the speciality of law, which he nominally adopted, 
 for the more congenial subjects of philosophy and 
 history. Marx was a zealous student, and apparently an 
 adherent of Hegelianism, but soon gave up his inten- 
 tion of following an academic career as a teacher of 
 philosophy, and joined the staff of the Rhenish Gazette, 
 published at Cologne as an organ of the extreme de- 
 mocracy. While thus engaged, however, he found that 
 
KARL MARX 125 
 
 his knowledge of economics required to be enlarged 
 and corrected, and accordingly in 1843, after marrying 
 the sister of the Prussian Minister, Von Westfalen, he 
 removed to Paris, where he applied himself to the study 
 of the questions to which his life and activity were hence- 
 forward to be devoted so entirely. Here also he began 
 to publish those youthful writings which must be reck- 
 oned among the most powerful expositions of the early 
 form of German socialism. With Arnold Ruge he 
 edited the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher. In 1845 
 he was expelled from Paris and settled in Brussels, 
 where he published his Discmi/rs sur le Libre ^chavvge, 
 and his criticism of Proudhon's Fhilosophie de la Mis&re, 
 entitled Misdre de la PMlosopMe. In Paris he had 
 already met Priedrich Engels, who was destined to be 
 his lifelong and loyal friend and companion-in-arms, 
 and who in 1845 published his important work, The 
 Condition of the Working Class in England. The two 
 friends found that they had arrived at a complete 
 identity of opinion ; and an opportunity soon occurred 
 for an emphatic expression of their common views. 
 
 A society of socialists, a kind of forerunner of the 
 International, had established itself in London, and 
 had been attracted by the new theories of Marx and 
 the spirit of strong and uncompromising conviction 
 with which he advocated them. They entered into 
 relation with Marx and Engels ; the society was re- 
 organised under the name of the Communist League ; 
 and a co gress was held, which resulted (1847) in the 
 framing erf the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which 
 was published in most of the languages of Western 
 
126 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Europe, and is the first proclamation of that revolution- 
 ary socialism armed with all the learning of the nine- 
 teenth century, but expressed with the fire and energy 
 of the agitator, which in the International and other 
 movements has so startled the world. 
 
 During the revolutionary troubles in 1 848 Marx re- 
 turned to Germany, and along with his comrades, Engels, 
 Wolff, &c., he supported the most advanced democracy 
 in the New Rhenish Gazette. In 1849 he settled in 
 London, where he spent his after-life in the elaboration 
 of his economic views and in the realisation of his revo- 
 lutionary programme. During this period he published 
 ZuT Kritih der politischen Oekonomie (1859), and the 
 first volume of his great work on capital. Das Kapital 
 (1867).* He died in London, March 14, 1883. It was 
 a time of the year which had been marked by the out- 
 break of the Commune at Paris, and is therefore for a 
 twofold reason a notable period in the history of the 
 proletariat. 
 
 The causes which have variously contributed to the 
 rise of German socialism are sufiiciently clear. With 
 the accession of the romanticist Frederick William IV. 
 to the throne of Prussia in 1840 German liberalism 
 received a fresh expansion. At the same time the 
 Hegelian school began to break up, and the interest 
 in pure philosophy began to wane. It was a time of 
 disillusionment, of dissatisfaction with idealism, of tran- 
 
 * The second volume of the Kapital has appeared since Marx's 
 death, as also an English translation of vol. i. by Messrs. Moore 
 and Aveling. Both have been edited by Fr. Engels. The Kofital 
 is to be completed in three volumes. 
 
KARL MARX 127 
 
 sition to realistic and even to materialistic ways of 
 thinking. This found strongest expression in the 
 Hegelian left, to which, after the ideals of the old 
 religions and philosophies had proved nnsubstantial, 
 there remained as solid residuum the real fact of man 
 with his positive interests in this liie. The devotion 
 and enthusiasm which had previously been fixed on 
 ideal and spiritual conceptions were concentrated on 
 humanity. To adherents of the Hegelian left, who had 
 been delivered from intellectual routine by the most 
 intrepid spirit of criticism, and who therefore had 
 little respect for the conventionalisms of a feudal 
 society, it naturally appeared that the interests of 
 humanity had been cruelly sacrificed in favour of class 
 privilege and prejudice. 
 
 The greatest thinkers of Germany had recognised the 
 noble elements in the French Eevolution. To recognise 
 also the noble and promising features of French social- 
 ism was a natural thing, especially for Germans who 
 had been in Paris, the great hearth of the new ideas. 
 Here they found themselves definitely and consciously 
 in presence of the last and greatest interest of humanity, 
 the suffering and struggling proletariat of Western 
 Europe, which had so recently made its definite entry 
 in the history of the world. Thus socialism became a 
 social, political, and economic creed to Karl Marx and 
 his associates. But they felt that the theories which 
 preceded them were wanting in scientific basis ; and it 
 was henceforward the twofold aim of the school to give 
 scientific form to socialism, and to propagate it in Europe 
 by the best and most effective revolutionary methods. 
 
128 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 The fundamental principle of the Marx school and of 
 the whole cognate socialism is the theory of ' surplus 
 value ' — the doctrine, namely, that, after the labourer 
 has been paid the wage necessary for the subsistence 
 of himself and family, the surplus produce of his labour 
 is appropriated by the capitalist who exploits it. This 
 theory is an application of the principle that labour 
 is the source of value, which was enunciated by many 
 of the old writers on economics, such as Locke and 
 Petty, which was set forth with some vagueness and 
 inconsistency by Adam Smith, and was more system- 
 atically expounded by Ricardo. The socialistic applica- 
 tion of the principle in the doctrine of surplus value 
 had been made both by Owenites and Chartists. It was 
 to prevent this appropriation of surplus value by capi- 
 talists and middlemen that the Owen school tried the 
 system of exchange by labour notes in 1832, the value 
 of goods being estimated in labour time, represented by 
 labour notes. 
 
 The principle that labour is the source of value has 
 been accepted in all its logical consequences by Marx, 
 and by him elaborated with extraordinary dialectical 
 skill and historical learning into the most complete pre- 
 sentation of socialism that has ever been offered to the 
 world. A like application of the principle, but in a less 
 comprehensive fashion, has been made by Eodbertus; and 
 it is the same theory that underlies the extravagances 
 and paradoxes of Proudhon. The question whether the 
 priority in the scientific development of the principle 
 is due to Marx or Eodbertus cannot be fully discussed 
 here. But it may be said that the theory had been set 
 
KARL MARX 129 
 
 forth by Eodbertus in his first work in 1842, that 
 the importance of the principle was understood by the 
 Marx school as early as 1845, ^^^^ t^i^t in a broad and 
 general way it had indeed become the common property 
 of socialists. The historical importance and scientific 
 worth of the writings of Eodbertus should not be over- 
 looked ; nor are they likely to be when so much atten- 
 tion has been given to him by A. Wagner and other 
 distinguished German economists. 
 
 But in the great work of Marx the socialist theory 
 is elaborated with a fulness of learning and a logical 
 power to which Eodbertus has no claim. With Marx 
 the doctrine of surplus value receives its widest appli- 
 cation and development : it supplies the key to his ex- 
 planation of the history and influence of capital, and 
 consequently of the present economic area, which is 
 dominated by it. It is the basis, in fact, of a vast and 
 elaborate system of social philosophy. In any case it 
 is an absurdity as well as an historical error to 
 speak of Marx as having borrowed from Eodbertus. 
 Marx was an independent thinker of great originality 
 and force of character, who had made the economic 
 development of modern Europe the study of a laborious 
 lifetime, and who was in the habit, not of borrowing, 
 but of strongly asserting the results of his own research 
 and of impressing them upon other men. 
 
 The great work of Marx may be described as an ex- 
 position and criticism of capital. But it is also indi- 
 rectly an exposition of socialism, inasmuch as the 
 historical evolution of capital is governed by natural 
 laws, the inevitable tendency of which is towards 
 
 9 
 
130 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 socialism. It is the great aim of Marx to reveal the 
 law of the economic movement of modern times. Now, 
 the economic movement of modern times is dominated 
 by capital. Explain, therefore, the natural history of 
 capital, the rise, consolidation, and decline of its supre- 
 macy as an evolutionary process, and you forecast the 
 nature of that into which it is being transformed — 
 socialism. Hence the great task of the Marx school is 
 not to preach a new economic and social gospel, not to 
 provide ready-made schemes of social regeneration after 
 the fashion of the early socialists, nor to counteract by 
 alleviating measures the wretchedness of our present 
 system, but to explain and promote the inevitable pro- 
 cess of social evolution, so that the domination of capital 
 may run its course and give place to the higher system 
 that is to come. 
 
 The characteristic feature of the regime of capital, 
 or, as Marx usually calls it, the capitalistic method of 
 production, is, that industrial operations are carried on 
 by individual capitalists employing free labourers, whose 
 sole dependence is the wage they receive. Those free 
 labourers perform the function fulfilled in other states 
 of society by the. slave and the serf. In the develop- 
 ment of the capitalistic system is involved the growth of 
 the two classes — the capitalist class, enriching itself on 
 the profits of industry, which they control in their own 
 interest, and the class of workers, nominally free, but 
 without land or capital, divorced, therefore, from the 
 means of production, and dependent on their wages — 
 the modern proletariat. The great aim of the capitalist 
 is the increase of wealth through the accumulation of 
 
KARL MARX 131 
 
 his profits. This accumulation is secured by the ap- 
 propriation o£ what the socialists call surplus value. 
 The history of the capitalistic method of production is 
 the history of the appropriation and accumulation of 
 surplus value. To understand the capitalistic system 
 is to understand surplus value. With the analysis of 
 value, therefore, the great work of Marx begins. 
 
 The wealth of the societies in which the capitalistic 
 method of production prevails appears as an enormous 
 collection of commodities. A commodity is in the first 
 place an external object adapted to satisfy human 
 wants ; and this usefulness gives it value in use, makes 
 it a use value. These use values form the material of 
 wealth, whatever its social form may be. In modern 
 societies, where the business of production is carried 
 on to meet the demands of the market, for exchange, 
 these use values appear as exchange values. Exchange 
 value is the proportion in which use values of different 
 kinds exchange for each other. But the enormous mass 
 of things that circulate in the world market exchange 
 for each other in the most different proportions. They 
 must, however, have a common quality, or they could 
 not be compared. This common quality cannot be any 
 of the natural properties of the commodities. In the 
 business of exchange one thing is as good as another, 
 provided you have it in sufficient quantity. 
 
 Leaving out of consideration, therefore, the physical 
 qualities that give commodities use value, we find in 
 them but one common characteristic — that they are all 
 products of human labour. They are all crystallised 
 forms of human labour. It is labour applied to natural 
 
132 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 objects that gives them value. What constitutes value 
 is the human labour embodied in commodities. And 
 the relation of exchange is only a phase of this 
 value, which is therefore to be considered independently 
 of it. Further, the labour time spent in producing 
 value is the measure of value, not this or that indi- 
 vidual labour, in which case a lazy or unskilled man 
 would produce as great a quantity of value as the most 
 skilful and energetic. We must take as our standard 
 the average labour force of the community. The labour 
 time which we take as the measure of value is the time 
 required to produce a commodity under the normal 
 social conditions of production with the average degree 
 of skill and intensity of labour. Thus labour is both 
 the source and the measure of value. 
 
 The conditions necessary to the existence and growtli 
 of capitalism, therefore, are as follows : A class, who 
 have a virtual monopoly of the means of production ; 
 another class of labourers, who are free, but destitute 
 of the means of production ; and a system of production 
 for exchange in a world market. But it may be asked 
 how these historical conditions were established ? How 
 did the capitalist class originate, and how were the 
 workers divorced from the instruments of labour, and 
 how was the world market opened up ? 
 
 Such a state of things was established only after 
 a long and gradual process of change, which Marx 
 copiously illustrates from the history of England, as the 
 slassic land of the fully developed capitalism. In the 
 Middle Ages the craftsman and peasant were the owners 
 of the small meana c£ production then extant, and they 
 
KARL MARX 133 
 
 produced for their own needs and for their feudal 
 superior; only the superfluity went into the general 
 market. Such production was necessarily small, limited, 
 and technically imperfect. Towards the close of the 
 Middle Ages a great change set in, caused by a remark- 
 able combination of circumstances — the downfall of the 
 feudal system and of the Catholic Church, the discovery 
 of America and of the sea route to India. Through 
 the breaking-up of the feudal houses with their nume- 
 rous retainers, through the transformation of the old 
 peasant-holdings into extensive sheep-runs, and gene- 
 rally through the prevalent application of the commer- 
 cial system to the management of land, instead of the 
 Catholic and feudal spirit, the peasantry were driven 
 off the land ; a multitude of people, totally destitute of 
 property, were thrown loose from their old means of 
 livelihood, and were reduced to vagabondage or forced 
 into the towns. It was in this way that the modern 
 proletarians made their tragic entry in history. 
 
 On the other hand, there was a parallel development 
 of the capitalist class, brought about by the slave trade, 
 the exploitation of the American colonies and' of both 
 the Indies, and by the robbery, violence, and corruption 
 which attended the transference of the land from the 
 Catholic and feudal to the modern regime. The open- 
 ing and extension of the great world market, moreover, 
 gave a great stimulus to industry at home. The old 
 guilds having already been expropriated and dissolved, 
 the early organisation of industry under the control of 
 an infant capitalism passed through its first painful and- 
 laborious stages, till, with the great mechanical iaven- 
 
134 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 tions, with tte application of steam as the motive- 
 power, and the rise of the factory system towards the 
 close of the eighteenth century, the great industrial revo- 
 lution was accomplished, and the capitalistic method of 
 production attained to its colossal manhood. 
 
 Thus the capitalistic system was established. And 
 we must remember that in all its forms and through all 
 the stages of its history the great aim of the capitalist 
 is to increase and consolidate his gains through the 
 appropriation of surplus value. We have now to in- 
 quire how this surplus value is obtained ? 
 
 The starting-point of the capitalistic ■ system is the 
 circulation of wares. As we have seen, the capitalistic 
 method of production is dominated by exchange. If 
 exchange, however, consisted merely in the giving and 
 receiving of equivalents, there could be no acquisition 
 of surplus value. -In the process of exchange there 
 must appear something, the utilisation of which by the 
 buyer yields a greater value than the price he pays 
 for it. 
 
 The thing desired is found in the labour force of the 
 workman, who, being destitute of the means of produc- 
 tion, must have recourse to the owner of these, the 
 capitalist. In other words, the workman appears on 
 the market with the sole commodity of which he has 
 to dispose, and sells it for a specified time at the price 
 it can bring, which we call his wage, and which is equiva- 
 lent to the average means of subsistence required to 
 support himself and to provide for the future supply of 
 labour (in his family). But the labour force of the 
 workman, as utilised by the capitalist in the factory or 
 
KARL MARX 135 
 
 the mine, produces a net value in excess of his wage ; 
 that is, over and above his entire outlay, including the 
 wage paid to his workmen, the capitalist finds himself 
 in possession of a surplus, which can only represent the 
 unpaid labour of his workmen. This surplus is the 
 surplus value of Karl Marx, the product of unpaid 
 labour. 
 
 This appropriation of surplus labour is a very old 
 phenomenon in human society. In all the forms of 
 society which depended on slave-labour, and under the 
 feudal regime the appropriation of the results of other 
 men's labour was open, undisguised, and compulsory. 
 Under the capitalistic system it is disguised under the 
 form of free contract. The effect is the same. For the 
 workman who is unprovided with the instruments of 
 labour, whose working power is useless without them, 
 this compulsion is not less real because it is concealed 
 under the forms of freedom. He must agree to this 
 free contract or starve. 
 
 It is the surplus value thus obtained which the 
 capitalist seeks to accumulate by all the methods avail- 
 able. These methods are described by Marx with 
 great detail and elaboration through several hundred 
 pages of his first volume. His account, supported at 
 every step by long and copious citations from the best 
 historical authorities and from the blue-books of the 
 various parliamentary commissions, is a lurid and ghastly 
 picture of the many abuses of English industrialism. 
 It is the dark and gloomy reverse of the industrial 
 glories of England. The fearful prolongation of the 
 hours of labour, the merciless exploitation of women 
 
136 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 and of children from the age of infancy, the utter 
 neglect of sanitary conditions — whatever could lessen the 
 costs of production and swell the profits of the capitalist, 
 though every law of man and nature were violated in 
 the process ; such are the historical facts which Marx 
 emphasises and illustrates with an overwhelming force 
 of evidence. They receive ample confirmation in the 
 history of the English Factory Acts, imposed on greedy 
 and unscrupulous capitalists after a severe struggle pro- 
 longed for half a century, and required to prevent the 
 moral and physical ruin of the industrial population. 
 
 We must now consider the process of the develop- 
 ment of capitalism rather more closely.* Under the 
 old system industry was carried on by the individual. 
 There could be no doubt as to the ownership of the 
 product, as he produced it by his own labour, with 
 materials and tools that belonged to himself. Such 
 was the normal method of production in those days. 
 
 It is very different in the existing system. The most 
 conspicuous result of the capitalistic system is, that 
 production is a social operation carried on by men 
 organised and associated in factories. But the product 
 is appropriated by individual capitalists: it is social 
 production and capitalistic appropriation. Whereas 
 the property of the preceding era rested on the indi- 
 vidual's own ■ labour, property under the capitalistic 
 system is the product of other men's labour. This 
 is the contradiction which runs through the entire 
 history of capitalism. Here we have in germ all ,the 
 antagonism and confusion of the present time. The 
 * See Fr, Engels' Umwalzung der Wissenschaft, p. 253, a,nd passim. 
 
KARL MARX 137 
 
 incompatibility of social production and capitalistic ap- 
 propriation must more and more declare itself as the 
 supremacy of the system extends over the world. 
 
 The contradiction between social production and 
 capitalistic appropriation naturally appears in the con- 
 trast between the human beings concerned in it. For 
 the appropriators. form the bourgeoisie, and the social 
 workers constitute the proletariat, the two historic 
 classes of the new era. Another conspicuous and im- 
 portant result is that, while we have this organisation 
 in the factory, we have outside of it all the anarchy of 
 competition. We have the capitalistic appropriators of 
 the product of labour contending for the possession of 
 the market, without systematic regard to the supply 
 required by that market — each one filling the market 
 only as dictated by his own interest, and trying to outdo 
 his rivals by all the methods of adulteration, bribery, 
 and intrigue; an economic war hurtful to the best 
 interests of society. With the development of the 
 capitalistic system machinery is more and more per- 
 fected, for to neglect improvement is to succumb in the 
 struggle ; the improved machinery renders labour super- 
 fluous, which is accordingly thrown idle and exposed to 
 starvation. And this is entirely satisfactory to the 
 capitalist class, whose interest it is to have a reserve 
 army of labourers disposable for the times when industry 
 is specially active, but cast out on the streets through 
 the crash that must necessarily follow. 
 
 But as the technique improves the productive power 
 of industry increases, and continually tends more and 
 more to surpass the available needs of the market, 
 
138 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 wide as it is. THs is all the more inevitable, because 
 the consumption of the masses of the population is re- 
 duced to the minimum requisite merely to maintain 
 them in life. It is another contradiction of the capital- 
 istic system that ou the one hand its inherent laws tend 
 to restrict the market which on the other hand it is 
 ready by all means fair and foul to extend. The con- 
 sequence is, that the market tends to be overstocked 
 even to absolute repletion ; goods will not sell, and a 
 commercial crisis is established, in which we have the 
 remarkable phenomenon of widespread panic, misery, 
 and starvation resulting from a superabundance of 
 wealth — a "crise pl6thorique," as Fourier called it, a 
 crisis due to a plethora of wealth. These crises occur 
 at periodic intervals, each one severer and more wide- 
 spread than the preceding, until they now tend to be- 
 come chronic and permanent, and the whole capitalistic 
 world staggers under an atlantean weight of ill-dis- 
 tributed wealth. Thus the process goes on in obedience 
 to its own inherent laws. Production is more and more 
 concentrated in the hands of mammoth capitalists and 
 colossal joint-stock companies, under which the prole- 
 tariat are organised and drilled into vast industrial 
 armies. But as crisis succeeds crisis, until panic, 
 stagnation, and disorder are universal, it becomes clear 
 that the hourgeoisie are no longer capable of controlling 
 the industrial world. In fact, the productive forces 
 rise in chronic rebellion against the forms imposed on 
 them by capitalism. 
 
 The incompatibility between social production and 
 anarchic distribution decidedly declares itself, A long 
 
KARL MARX 139 
 
 course of hard experience tas trained the modern 
 democracy in the insight necessary for the appreciation 
 of the conditions of its own existence. The social 
 character of production is explicitly recognised. The 
 proletariat seizes the political power, and through it at 
 last takes complete control over the economic functions 
 of society. It expropriates the private capitalist, and, 
 appropriating the means of production, manages them 
 in its own interest, which is the interest of society as a 
 whole ; society passes into the socialistic stage through 
 a revolution determined by the natural laws of social 
 evolution, and not by a merely arbitrary exercise of 
 power. It is a result determined by the inherent laws 
 of social evolution, independent of the will and purpose 
 of individual men. All that the most powerful and 
 clear-sighted intellect can do is to learn to divine the 
 laws of the great movement of society, and to shorten 
 and alleviate the birth-pangs of the new era. The 
 efforts of reactionaries of every class to turn the wheel 
 of history backwards are in vain. But an intelligent 
 appreciation of its tendencies, and a willing co-operation 
 with them, will make progress easier, smoother, and 
 more rapid. 
 
 We need hardly return to the role which is played 
 by surplus value in this vast historical process. The 
 capitalist appropriates the product of labour because it 
 contains surplus value. It is the part of the product 
 that embodies surplus value and represents a clear gain 
 which attracts him. Surplus value is the beginning, 
 middle, and end of capitalism. It moves it alike in its 
 origin, and progress, decline and fall. It is the keynote 
 
I40 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 of a great process of historic evolution continued for 
 centuries ; the secret of a vast development, which 
 becomes more and more open as time goes on. And 
 capitalism grows sick of the sustenance which formerly- 
 nourished it. It dies of over-repletion, of habitual 
 excess in surplus value. 
 
 Let us now inquire how far the Marx school have 
 thrown any light on the forms likely to be assumed by 
 the new society after the downfall of capitalism. In 
 his mature works as far as published Marx himself has 
 said little to guide us. The clearest indication of his 
 views is contained in the following passage : — ' Let us 
 assume an association of free men, who work with 
 common means of production and consciously put forth 
 their many individual labour powers as a social labour 
 power. The total product of the association is a social 
 product. A part of this product serves again as means 
 of production. It remains social property. But another 
 part is as means of living consumed by the members of 
 the association. It must therefore be distributed among 
 them. The nature of this distribution will change 
 according to the special nature of the organisation of 
 production and the corresponding grade of historical 
 development of the producers.' And then he goes on 
 to assume that the share of each producer in the means 
 of living may be determined by his labour time. Labour 
 time will at once serve as measure of the share of each 
 producer in the common labour, and therefore also of 
 his share in the portion of the common product which 
 is devoted to consumption.* 
 
 * Das Kapital, i. 48. 
 
KARL MARX 141 
 
 Another important indication by one who has full- 
 right to speak for Marx is contained in Pr. Engels' 
 views regarding the State. After the proletariat have 
 seized political power and transformed the means of 
 production into State property, the State will cease to 
 exist. In the old societies the State was an organisation 
 of the exploiting class for the maintenance of the con- 
 ditions of exploitation that suited it. Officially the 
 representatives of the whole society, the exploiting class 
 only represented itself. But when the State at last 
 becomes the real representative of the whole society it 
 renders itself superfluous. In a society which contains 
 no subject class, from which class rule and the anarchy 
 of production and the collisions and excesses of the 
 struggle for individual existence have been removed, 
 there is nothing to repress, and no need for a repressing 
 force like the State. The first act, wherein the State 
 really appears as representative of the entire society — 
 the appropriation of the means of production in the 
 name of society — is also its last independent act as 
 State. In place of the government over persons, there 
 will be an administration of things and the control of 
 productive processes. The State is not abolished ; it 
 dies away.* 
 
 In efiect, these two indications of opinion point to a 
 condition of society which is not fundamentally different 
 from that contemplated by the anarchist school. Both 
 look forward to a period when men will live in free 
 associations, and when the administration of social affairs 
 will be conducted without the exercise of compulsion. 
 * Umwal^nmg der Wissenschaft pp. 267, 268. 
 
142 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 It will have been seen that what Marx and his school 
 contemplate is an economic revolution brought about in 
 accordance with the natural laws of historic evolution. 
 But in order to understand the full import of this 
 revolution in the mind of Marx, we must remember 
 that he regards the economic order of society as the 
 groundwork of the same, determining all the other 
 forms of social order. The entire legal and political 
 structure, as well as philosophy and religion, are con- 
 stituted and controlled in accordance with the economic 
 basis. This is in harmony with his method and his 
 conception of the world, which is the Hegelian reversed : 
 ' For Hegel the thought process, which he transforms 
 into an independent subject under the name idea, is the 
 creator of the real, which forms only its external mani- 
 festation. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is 
 nothing else than the material transformed and trans- 
 lated in the human brain.' His conception of the world 
 is a frank and avowed materialism. 
 
 And to a world thus understood he applies the 
 dialectic method of investigation. Dialectic is a word 
 current in the Hegelian and other philosophies. It 
 sounds rather out of place in a materialistic view of the 
 world. In the system of Marx it means that the busi- 
 ness of inquiry is to trace the connection and concatena- 
 tion in the links that make up the process of historic 
 evolution,to investigate how one stage succeeds another 
 in the development of society, the facts and forms of 
 human life and history not being stable and stereotyped 
 things, but the ever-changing manifestations of the 
 fluent and unresting real, the course of which it is the 
 
KARL MARX 143 
 
 duty of science to reveal. Both Marx and Pr. Engels, 
 moreover, are fond of expressing the development of 
 capitalism in the language of the well-known Hegelian 
 threefold process — thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. 
 Private property resting on a man's own labour of the 
 former times is the thesis. The property resting on 
 other men's labour of the capitalistic era is the nega- 
 tion of this individual property. The expropriation of 
 the capitalists by the proletariat is the negation of the 
 negation, or synthesis. But how far this use of the 
 Hegelian terms is merely a form of literary expression, 
 or how far it is a survival in Marx of a real belief in 
 Hegelianism, it is not easy to determine.* 
 
 The whole position of the Marx school may be 
 characterised as evolutionary and revolutionary socialism, 
 based on a materialistic conception of the world and of 
 human history. Socialism is a social revolution deter- 
 mined by the laws of historic evolution — a revolution 
 which, changing the economic groundwork of society, 
 will change the whole structure. 
 
 The work of Marx is a natural history of capital, 
 especially in its relation to labour, and in its most 
 essential features is a development of two of the leading 
 principles of the classic economics — that labour is the 
 source of value, but that of this value the labourer 
 obtains for himself merely a subsistence wage, the 
 surplus being appropriated by the exploiting capitalist. 
 Marx's great work may be described as an elaborate 
 historical development of this glaring fundamental con- 
 tradiction of the Ricardian economics, the. contradiction 
 * See Preface to second edition of the Kapitdl, p. xix. 
 
144 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 between the iron law of wages and the great principle 
 that labour is the source of wealth. Marx's conception 
 of labour is the same as that of Ricardo, and as a logical 
 exposition of the historic contradiction between the two 
 principles, on the basis of Ricardo, the work of Marx is 
 quite unanswerable. It is obvious, however, that the 
 definition of labour assumed both in Ricardo and Marx 
 is too narrow. The labour they broadly posit as the 
 source of wealth is manual labour. In the early stages 
 of industry, when the market was small and limited, 
 and the technique was of the simplest and rudest 
 description, labour in that sense might correctly enough 
 be described as the source of value. But in modern 
 industry, when the market is world-wide, the technique 
 most complex, and the competition most severe, when 
 inventiveness, sagacity, courage, and decision in initia- 
 tive, and skill in management, are factors so important 
 no such exclusive place as has been claimed can be 
 assigned to labour. The Ricardian principle, therefore, 
 falls to the ground. 
 
 And it is not historically true to maintain, as Marx 
 does, that the profits of the capitalist are obtained simply 
 by appropriating the products of unpaid labour. In 
 initiating and managing, the capitalist is charged with 
 the most diflacult and important part of the work of 
 production. As a natural consequence, it follows that 
 Marx is also historically inaccurate in roundly explain- 
 ing capital as the accumulation of unpaid labour 
 appropriated by the capitalist. In past accumulation, 
 as in the control and management of industry generally, 
 the capitalist has had the leading part. Capital, there- 
 
KARL MARX 145 
 
 fore, is not necessarily robbery, and in an economic 
 order in whicli the system of free exchange is the rule 
 and the mutually beneficial interchange of utilities, no 
 objection can be raised to the principle of lending and 
 borrowing of money for interest. In short, in his theory 
 of unpaid labour as supplying the key to his explana- 
 tion of the genesis and development of the capitalistic 
 system, Marx is not true to history. It is the perfectly 
 logical outcome of certain of the leading principles of 
 the Ricardian school, but it does not give an adequate 
 or accurate account of the facts of economic evolution. 
 
 In his theory of unpaid labour Marx is not consistent 
 with the general principles of his own philosophy of 
 social evolution. With him history is a process deter- 
 mined by material forces, a succession of orderly 
 phenomena controlled by natural laws. Now we may 
 waive the objection suggested by the principle enun- 
 ciated in the Marx school itself, that it is not legitimate 
 to apply ethical categories in judgment on economic 
 processes that are merely natural; which, however, 
 Marx does with revolutionary emphasis throughout 
 some hundreds of pages of his great work. It is more 
 important to point out, in perfect consistency with the 
 principles of the school, that the energy and inventive- 
 ness of the early capitalists especially were the most 
 essential factors in determining the' existence and 
 development of a great economic era, and that the 
 assertion of freedom was an indispensable condition in 
 breaking the bonds of the old feudal order, which the 
 new system displaced. Instead, therefore, of living and 
 growing rich on the produce of unpaid labour, the 
 
 10 
 
146 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 capitalist had a great social and industrial function to 
 perform, and played a great part in historic evolution. 
 The position and function of the workman was sub- 
 ordinate. 
 
 In short, Marx has not sufficiently recognised the 
 fact that the development of the new social forces 
 brought with it a new set of functions : that of initiat- 
 ing and directing industrial enterprise. These functions 
 are not comprehended in the narrow definition of labour, 
 but they are, nevertheless, most essential to progress ; 
 and the men that performed them have a most complete 
 historical reason for their existence and a share in the 
 results of industry. We need not add that such an 
 urgument does not justify all they did as the heads of 
 the new industry. There is ample evidence that they 
 were often rough, hard, cruel, and unscrupulous in the 
 prosecution of their industrial enterprises. Nor does it 
 prejudice the question whether the like direction of 
 industry must and should continue in the future. 
 
 There can be no doubt that in his theory of surplus 
 value obtained from unpaid labour, Marx, as agitator 
 and controversialist, has fallen into serious contradiction 
 with himself as scientific historian and philosopher. The 
 theory that labour is the source of value was widely 
 accepted among economists during his early life, and 
 by its justice and nobleness it was well adapted to the 
 comfortable optimism prevalent among so many of the 
 classical school. The economists, however, did not 
 follow the principle to its obvious conclusion : that 
 if labour is the source of wealth, the labourer should 
 enjoy it all. It was otherwise with the socialists, who 
 
KARL MARX i47 
 
 were not slow to perceive the bearing of the theory on 
 the existing economic order. In his controversial 
 treatise against Proudhon, Marx gives a list of writers 
 (beginning with the political economy of Hopkins,* 
 published in 1822, only five years after the appearance 
 of Eicardo's great work), by whom the principle was 
 applied to revolutionary purposes. Its simplicity and 
 seeming effectiveness must have made it most attrac- 
 tive. As posited by the classic economy, and applied by 
 the socialists, Marx accepted the principle. It was an 
 unanswerable argwmentum ad hominem when addressed 
 to an economist of the Eicardian school ; but it should 
 have broken down when confronted with historical fact. 
 Nevertheless it was made, and continued to be, the 
 foundation stone of the system of Marx, and is really 
 its weakest point. His doctrine of surplus value is the 
 vitiating factor in his history of the capitalistic system. 
 The most obvious excuse for him is that he borrowed it 
 from the classic economists. 
 
 It may now be convenient to sum up the socialism of 
 the Marx school under the following heads : — 
 
 (i) Materialistic conception of the world, and of 
 history. 
 
 (2) Dialectic method of investigation. 
 
 (3) The economic order is the basis of all social 
 order; the entire legal and political structure of 
 society, religion and philosophy are to be explained 
 in accordance with the economic basis. 
 
 * This, however, must be a mistake for T. Hodgskin, who in 
 1825 published a pamphlet, Labowr defended against the Claims of 
 Capital in which such views are set forth. 
 
X48 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 (4) The historic evolution of capitalism; how, 
 from the fifteenth century onwards, the capitalist 
 class was developed, and how a corresponding 
 proletariat was created. 
 
 (5) The capitalist class grows by the appropria- 
 tion and accumulation of the surplus value con- 
 tained in the product of labour, whilst the 
 proletariat is reduced to a subsistence wage. It is 
 social production and capitalistic appropriation. 
 
 (6) Organisation in the factory; anarchy in 
 society as a whole. 
 
 (7) This anarchy is intensified, especially in the 
 great commercial crises, showing that the middle 
 class are no longer able to control the productive 
 forces. 
 
 (8) All these contradictions can be solved only 
 by an explicit recognition of the social character of 
 production. The proletariat seizes political power 
 and transforms the means of production into social 
 property. 
 
 (9) The State, which has hitherto been an 
 arrangement for holding the producing class in 
 subjection, will become superfluous, and die a 
 natural death. Henceforward, government will 
 consist simply in the control of industrial pro- 
 cesses. 
 
 Fr. Bngels sums up the achievement of his friend 
 Marx in the two great discoveries — ^the materialistic 
 conception of history, and the revelation of the secret 
 of the capitalistic method of production by means of 
 surplus value. Materialism is a very old theory of the 
 
KARL MARX 149 
 
 world. It is now given up by competent thinkers, and 
 we need not discuss it here. Nor need we say that it is 
 a grave exaggeration to maintain that all social institu- 
 tions, including philosophy and religion, .are to be 
 explained by reference to the economic factors. History 
 is a record of the activity of the human mind in very 
 many directions. Men have had various interests, which 
 have had a substantive, and so far, an independent 
 value, though they must also be regarded as an organic 
 whole. It is absolutely impossible to account for all by 
 reference to any one. Nevertheless, it is a great merit 
 of Marx that he has so powerfully called attention to 
 the vast importance of the economic side of history. 
 The economic factors in the life of mankind have been 
 sadly neglected, even by philosophic historians. Such 
 neglect has been partly due to the scarcity of material 
 relating to this aspect of their subject, partly owing to 
 false conceptions of the function of the historian, chiefly 
 because their public was a high-bred class, which had 
 no particular wish to read about such unfashionable 
 topics as those connected with the daily toil of the 
 lower orders. In this way the true causation of history 
 has often been overlooked, or totally misconceived, and 
 results have, in thousands of instances, been traced to 
 conventional and imaginary agencies, when the real 
 origin lay deep down in the economic life of the people. 
 We are now beginning to see that large sections of 
 history will need to be re-written in this new light. 
 
 To proceed with our criticism of Marx. It is a 
 feature of his materialistic conception of history that his 
 language respecting the inevitable march of society 
 
ISO A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 would sometimes suggest a kind o£ fatalism. But this 
 is more than counterbalanced by his strong assertion 
 of the revolutionary will. On both sides we see over- 
 statement. The most prominent feature of his teaching, 
 however, in this reference, is the excessive stress which 
 he lays on the virtues iand possibilities of the revolu- 
 tionary method of action. The evolution he con- 
 templates is attended and disturbed by great historic 
 breaks, by cataclysm and catastrophe. These and other 
 features of his teaching, to which objection must be 
 made, were most pronounced in his early writings, 
 especially in the Manifesto of the Communist League,- 
 ■but they continue to be visible throughout his life. 
 According to his latest teaching, a great revolutionary 
 catastrophe is to close the capitalistic era ; and this 
 must be regarded as a very bad preparation for the 
 time of social peace which is forthwith to follow. The 
 proletariat, the class which is to accomplish the revolu- 
 tion, he describes as oppressed, enslaved, and degen- 
 erate. How can such a class be expected to perform so 
 great an historic function well and successfully ? 
 
 But the main defect of his teaching lies in the 
 arbitrariness and excessive abstractness that characterise 
 his method of investigation and presentation ; and this 
 defect particularly attaches to the second great dis- 
 tjovery attributed to him by Pr. Engels — his theory of 
 surplus value. For an explanation of this, we have 
 simply to refer to the life and experience of Marx. 
 During his youth, and when his mind was being formed, 
 the Hegelian philosophy was supreme in Germany. 
 Marx was a German, trained in the school of Hegel; 
 
Karl: MARX 151 
 
 aad he passed most of his life in laborious seclusion, in 
 exile and revolt against dominant ideas and institutions. 
 Though a materialist, he does not show suflBcient respect 
 for facts, for history. In reading his great work, we 
 feel that the facts are in chronic rebellion against the 
 formulas to which he seeks to adapt them. 
 
 Adam Smith, the founder of Political Economy, was 
 also academic at the outset of his life ; but he was a 
 Scotsman of a period when the ablest Scotsmen were 
 trained by French Clearness and common sense. And he 
 was not in revolt, like Marx, but in full sympathy with a 
 cause whose time had come, whereas Marx represented 
 a cause which had not yet attained to any considerable 
 degree of clearness. In learning and philosophic 
 power, Marx will compare favourably with Adam 
 Smith ; but in historic reasonableness, in respect for 
 fact and reality. Smith is decidedly his superior. In 
 Smith's great work we see philosophy controlled by 
 fact, by historic knowledge and insight. The work of 
 Marx, in many of its most important sections, is an 
 arbitrary and artificial attempt to force his formulas on 
 the facts of history. Whether the fault lay in the 
 Hegelian philosophy, or in Marx's use of it, there can 
 be no doubt that its influence has inflicted most serious 
 damage on what might otherwise have been a splendid 
 historical work. 
 
 In dealing with history, we must accept facts and 
 men as we find them. The facts are as they are ; and 
 the men of history are not ideal men. It would be 
 most unreasonable and ungrateful to undervalue the 
 services rendered by Karl Marx. He spent forty 
 
152 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 laborious years almost wholly in exile as the scientific 
 champion of the proletariat. In the combination of 
 learning, philosophic acumen, and literary power he is 
 probably second to no economic thinker of the nine- 
 teenth century. He seems to have been master of the 
 whole range of economic literature, and wielded it with 
 a logical skill not less masterly. But his great strength 
 lay in his knowledge of the technical and economic 
 development of modern industry, and in his marvellous 
 insight into the tendencies in social evolution determined 
 by the technical and economic factors. Whether his 
 theories in this department are right or wrong they 
 have suggested questions that will demand the atten- 
 tion of economic thinkers for a long time to come. It 
 is in this department and not in his theory of surplus 
 value that Marx's significance as a scientific economist 
 is to be found. 
 
 Notwithtanding all that may justly be said in 
 criticism of Marx, it remains, then, that his main 
 achievement consists in the work he has done as 
 scientific inquirer into the economic movement of 
 modern times, as the philosophic historian of the 
 capitalistic era. It is now admitted by all inquirers 
 worthy of the name that history, including econo- 
 mic history, is a succession of orderly phenomena, 
 that each phase in the line of succession is marked by 
 facts and tendencies more or less peculiar to itself, and 
 that laws and principles which we now condemn had 
 formerly an historical necessity, justification, and 
 validity. In accordance with this fundamental prin- 
 ciple of historical evolution arrangements and insti- 
 
KARL MARX 153 
 
 tutions which were once necessary, and originally 
 formed a stage in human progress, may gradually 
 develop contradictions and abuses, and thus become 
 more or less antiquated. The economic social and 
 political forms which were the progressive and even 
 adequate expressions of the life of one era become 
 hindrances and fetters to the life of the succeeding 
 times. This, the school of Karl Marx says, is precisely 
 the condition of the present economic order. The 
 existing arrangements of landlord, capitalist, and 
 wage-labourer under free competition are burdened 
 with contradiction and abuse. The life of society is 
 being strangled by the forms which once promoted it. 
 They maintain that the really vital and powerful ten- 
 dencies of our time are towards a higher and wider 
 form of social and economic organisation — towards 
 socialism. Here, as we believe, is the central point of 
 the whole question. The place of Marx in history will 
 depend on how far he has made a permanent contribu- 
 tion towards the settlement of it. 
 
 During his lifetime the opinions of Marx were 
 destined to find expression in two movements, which 
 have played a considerable part in recent history— the 
 International and the social democracy of Germany. 
 Of the International Marx was the inspiring and con- 
 trolling head from the beginning; and the German 
 social democracy, though originated by Lassalle, be- 
 fore long fell under Marx's influence. Marx wrote 
 the famous inaugural address of the International and 
 drew up its statutes, maintaining a moderation of tone 
 which contrasted strongly with the outspoken vigour 
 
IS4 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 of the communist manifesto of 1847. But it was not 
 long before the revolutionary socialism which underlay 
 the movement gained the upper hand. The Inter- 
 national no doubt afforded a splendid opportunity for 
 the propaganda of Marx. The fortunes of the Inter- 
 national and of the German social democracy will be 
 sketched in subsequent chapters. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE INTERNATIONAL 
 
 It is an iaevitable outcome of the prevalent historic 
 forces that the laboiir question has become inter- 
 national. 
 
 From the dawn of history there has been a widening 
 circle of communities with international relations. 
 Civilisation has its earhest seats on the banks of the 
 Nile and the Euphrates. The Greeks and Phoenicians 
 carried it round the shores of the Mediterranean. The 
 Romans received it from the Greeks, and, after adding 
 to it a valuable contribution of their own, handed it on 
 to the nations of Western and Central Europe. The 
 Christian Church spread over the countries in which the 
 Roman peace prevailed, but did not confine itself to 
 the limits of the empire. 
 
 Amidst the group of nations who thus participated in 
 the Greco-Roman culture and in the Christian life, 
 there has always been a special degree of international 
 sympathy: ideas and institutions have been largely 
 common to them all. Feudalism and the Church, 
 chivalry and the Crusades, all these were international 
 in their influence. 
 
 Then, as now, great ideas and great movements could 
 
iS6 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 not be confined within national barriers. In the 
 expansive and progressive epochs of history, parti- 
 cularly, supreme interests have raised men above the 
 prejudices of race, and have united them by wider and 
 deeper principles than those by which they are 
 separated into nations. 
 
 At the great religious revolt of the sixteenth century, 
 Germans combined with the Swedes and the French 
 against their own countrymen. The Catholic Church, 
 as its name implies, has always been, and still continues 
 to be, a great international institution. 
 
 The enlightenment of the eighteenth century had an 
 international influence, and at the French Revolution 
 high concerns of political and social freedom for a time 
 broke through the conventional feelings of patriotism. 
 Germans, Italians, and even Englishmen, were in many 
 cases ready to receive the boon of a better order of 
 things at the price of French victory over their own 
 countrymen. Only for a time, till the enthusiasm of 
 the Revolution was made subservient to the selfishness 
 of the new -France — an instrument for the colossal 
 egotism of a single man. 
 
 In our time, steam and the electric telegraph have 
 become the bearers of a widening international move- 
 ment. All the great human interests are cultivated and 
 pursued on a wider scale than ever — religion, science, 
 literature, art. 
 
 Commerce and industry have naturally shared in the 
 general expansion. We have only to scan the opera- 
 tions of the great markets and exchanges in any daily 
 paper as a proof of this. In a small space round the 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL 157 
 
 Bank of England, financial transactions are carried on 
 which powerfully affect the entire world. Even the 
 very simple breakfast of an ordinary citizen is a great 
 international function, in which the productions of 
 the most diverse countries combine to appease his 
 wants. 
 
 The methods and appliances of this modem industry 
 have been developed in England since the middle of the 
 eighteenth century. Not many years ago England was 
 still the supreme, almost the exclusive, representative 
 of the new industry ; now it is becoming the common 
 possession of all countries, dominated by European 
 culture, and is rapidly gaining ground in the long- 
 isolated nations of the East. The competition for 
 business among the capitalists of various countries 
 grows more intense every year. Once carried on chiefly 
 or entirely for local needs, production has now to work 
 for a market of wide and often incalculable extent. 
 
 Under these circumstances, we need not be surprised 
 that labour, the prime factor in industry, has inter- 
 national interests and relations of the most serious 
 importance. Its antagonism to capitalism must declare 
 itself on the international arena. In the competitive 
 struggles of the last fifty years, the cheap labour of one 
 nation has not seldom been thrown into the scale to 
 weigh down the dear labour of another. Irishmen, 
 Germans, Belgians and Italians have often rendered 
 unavailing the efforts of English and French workmen 
 for a higher standard of living. Continuous emigration 
 from Europe depresses-American labour. The Chinese, 
 aind other Eastern races, habituated to a very low 
 
158 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Rtandard of subsistence, menace the workmen of 
 America and Australia. 
 
 The capitalists of most countries have long sought to 
 shield themselves against the consequences of competi- 
 tion by protection, by combinations tacit or avowed 
 among themselves, of wide and frequently international 
 magnitude. In view of the facts that we have indicated, 
 in view of the example thus set them, why should not 
 the working men seek to regulate their international 
 interests ? 
 
 Efforts towards the international organisation of 
 labour have proceeded chiefly from men who, banished 
 from their own country by reactionary governments, 
 have carried to other lands the seeds of new thought, 
 and, meeting abroad those of like mind and like fate 
 with themselves, have naturally planned the overthrow 
 of their common oppressors. The origin of the famous 
 International Association of Working Men was largely 
 due to such, a group of exiles. 
 
 In 1836, a number of German exiles at Paris formed 
 themselves into a secret society, under the name of the 
 League of the Just, the principles of which were com- 
 munistic* Beiiig involved in a rising at Paris in 1839, 
 they removed to London. Here they met with workmen 
 belonging to the nations of Northern Europe, to which 
 German is a common speech, and the League naturally 
 began to assume an international character. 
 
 This was not the only change which the League 
 underwent. Its members began to understand that 
 
 * Enthiillungen uber den Oommvm.istev^Prozess zu Koln, von Karl 
 Marx, Jjinleitung von Fr. Engels, p. 3. 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL 159 
 
 their real duty under the present cirGumstances was 
 not conspiracy or the stirring up of revolutionary out- 
 breaks, but propaganda. The basis of the League had 
 been a sentimental communism, based on their motto 
 that ' all men are brothers.' From Marx they learned 
 that the emancipation of the proletariat must be guided 
 by scientific insight into the conditions of its own 
 existence and its own history ; that their communism 
 must indeed be a revolutionary one, but it must be a 
 revolution in harmony with the inevitable tendencies of 
 social evolution. The cardinal point in the theory 
 worked out by Marx and now impressed upon the 
 League, was the doctrine that the economic conditions 
 control the entire social structure, therefore the main 
 thing in a social revolution is a change in economic 
 conditions. 
 
 The group of exiles put themselves into communica- 
 tion with Marx, and a Congress was held in London in 
 1 847, with the result that the association was reorganised 
 under the name of the Communist League. 
 
 The aim of the League is very comprehensively stated 
 in the first article of its constitution : ' The aim of the 
 League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of 
 the proletariat, the abolition of the old society resting 
 on class antagonisms, and the founding of a new society 
 without classes and without private property.' 
 
 Marx and Bngels were commissioned by the League 
 to set forth its principles in a manifesto, which, as the 
 manifesto of the communistic party, was published 
 shortly before the Revolution of February 1848. We 
 shall best illustrate the spirit and aim of the treatise 
 
i6o A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 by quoting Fr. Engels' Preface to the edition of 
 1883: 
 
 ' The Preface to the present edition I must, alas ! 
 sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the entire working 
 class of Europe and America owes more than any other 
 — ^Marx rests in the cemetery at Highgate, and the 
 grass already begins to grow over his grave. Since 
 his death nothing further can be said of a revisal 
 or completion of the manifesto. It is therefore the 
 more necessary expressly to make the following 
 statement. 
 
 ' The pervading thought of the manifesto : that the 
 economic production with the social organisation of each 
 historical epoch necessarily resulting therefrom forms 
 the basis for the political and intellectual history of this 
 epoch ; that accordingly (since the dissolution of the 
 primitive common property in land) the entire history 
 is a history of class struggles — struggles between ex- 
 ploited and exploiting, ruled and ruling, classes at 
 different stages of social development; but that this 
 struggle has now reached a stage when the exploited 
 and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no more free 
 itself from the exploiting and oppressing class (the 
 hourgeoisie) without at the same time delivering the 
 whole of society for ever from exploitation, oppression 
 and class struggles — this pervading thought belongs 
 exclusively and alone to Marx.' 
 
 ' The history of all society hitherto has been the 
 history of class struggles ; ' such is the key-note of the 
 manifesto. ' But it is a distinguishing feature of the 
 present time that it has simplified class antagonisms ; 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL i6i 
 
 the entire human society more and more divides itself 
 into two great hostile camps, into two great conflicting 
 classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat.' The manifesto is 
 for the most part an exposition and discussion of these 
 two classes, the historical conditions under which they 
 have grown np, their mutual relations, past, present, 
 and future. 
 
 It would not be easy to give a brief analysis of the 
 manifesto, nor is it necessary, as we have, in. our chapter 
 on Marx, already given an account of the same views in 
 their maturer and more philosophic expression. The 
 manifesto is a treatise instinct with the fiery energy and 
 enthusiasm of a young revolutionary party, and its 
 doctrines are the doctrines of Marx in a crude, exag- 
 gerated and violent form. In such a pamphlet, written 
 for propaganda, we must not expect the self-restraining 
 moderation of statement, the clear perspective, or tl^e 
 high judicial charity which should characterise a sober 
 historical exposition. 
 
 The iron law of wagfis is stated in its hardest and 
 most exaggerated form. . To the charge that they desire 
 to abolish private property, its authors reply that in- 
 dividual property, the produce of a man's own labour, is 
 already abolished. What they desire to abolish is the 
 appropriation of other men's labour by the capitalist. 
 To the charge that they wish to abolish the family, they 
 reply to the bourgeoisie with a tu quogue: ye have 
 already abolished it by the exploitation of women and 
 children in the factories, which has broken up the 
 family ties, through the prevalence of prostitution and 
 the common practice of adultery. The charge of abolish- 
 
 u 
 
i62 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 ing patriotism they repudiate in the same manner : the 
 workman has no country. 
 
 We cannot understand the manifesto unless we re- 
 member that it was drawn up by young men living in 
 exile, and that it was written in 1847, shortly after 
 some of the earliest inquiries into the condition of labour 
 both in England and the Continent had revealed facts 
 which ought to fill every human heart with sorrow and 
 indignation. 
 
 As the manifesto of the first international combina- 
 tion of workmen, it has a special historical importance 
 and claims special attention. And apart from that, it is 
 one of the most remarkable utterances of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 ' The manifesto,' says Pr. Engels, ' was sent to the 
 press at London a few weeks before the February Eevo- 
 lution. Since then it has made the tour of the world. 
 It has been translated into almost every tongue, and in 
 the most different countries still serves as the guiding- 
 star of the proletarian movement. The old motto of 
 the League " All men are brethren," was replaced by 
 the new battle-cry, " Proletarians of all lands unite," 
 which openly proclaimed the international character of 
 the struggle. Seventeen years later this battle-cry 
 resounded through the world as the watchword of 
 the International Working Men's Association, and the 
 militant proletariat of all lands has to-day written it on 
 its banner.' * 
 
 The Eevolution of 1848, as we have already seen,t 
 was a rising of the people in Prance, Italy, Germany, 
 * Enihiilhrngen, Introdufction, p. ii. -f P. 44. 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL 163 
 
 Austria, and Hungary against antiquated political 
 arrangements and institutions. It was partly an inter- 
 ruption to the operations of the League, as it was far 
 too weak to exercise any great influence on the course 
 of events; but it was also an opportunity, as its 
 members found access to the land of their birth, and in 
 many parts of Germany formed the most resolute and 
 advanced wing of the struggling democracy during 
 that troubled period. 
 
 After the triumph of the reaction it became clear 
 that the hope of effective revolutionary activity had 
 again for a time passed away. A period of unexampled 
 industrial prosperity set in. Capitalism was about to 
 enter a far wider phase of development than it had yet 
 seen, a fact which abundantly showed that the time was 
 not favourable for an active propaganda in the interests 
 of the proletariat. When capitalism has become a 
 hindrance to progressive social development, when it is 
 obviously too weak and narrow a framework for further 
 evolution, only then is there hope of successful eflfort 
 against it. So reasoned Marx and his associates. He 
 withdrew therefore from the scene of action to his 
 study in London. In 1852 the first international com- 
 bination of working men came to a close. Observers 
 who could not reasonably be considered superficial, 
 thought that the movement had died without hope of 
 resurrection. 
 
 But the triumph of reactionary governments in 1849 
 was not a settlement of the great questions that had 
 been raised during that period of revolution; it was 
 only a postponement of them. Before many years had 
 
i64 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 passed, the peoples of Europe again began to move 
 uneasily under the yoke of antiquated political forms. 
 The rising of Italy against Austria in 1 8 59 ; the struggle 
 of Prussian Liberals against the Ministry ; the resolye 
 of Bismarck and his Sovereign to have the Prussian 
 army ready for action in the way of reconstituting a 
 united Germany on the ruins of the old Federation — 
 these were only different symptoms of a fresh advance. 
 They were ere long to be followed by similar activity in 
 Prance, Spain, and Eastern Europe, all proving that the 
 history of European communities is an organic move- 
 ment, the reach and potency of which often disturb the 
 forecast of the politician. In the generation after 1848 
 the governments were everywhere constrained to carry 
 out the political programme which the people had 
 drawn out for them during the revolution. 
 
 The social question may seem to have only a remote 
 connection with the political movements just mentioned, 
 and yet the revival of the social question was but another 
 sign of the new life in Europe,, which could not be 
 repressed. The founding of the social-democracy of 
 Germany by Lassalle, and the appearance of the Inter- 
 national on a wider and worthier scale under the auspices 
 of Marx, were a clear proof that the working classes of 
 the most advanced countries of Europe now meant to 
 claim a better share in the moral and material inherit 
 tance of the human race. We have now to sketch the 
 growth of the movement, which is properly styled the 
 International. 
 
 Appropriately enough, the event which gave the first 
 occasion for the founding of the International Associa- 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL 165 
 
 tion of Working Men was tlie International Exhibition 
 of London in 1862. The workmen of Prance sent a 
 deputation to visit the Exhibition. This visit had the 
 approval and even pecaniary support of the Emperor ; 
 and it was warmly commended by some of the leading 
 Parisian journals as a means not only of acquainting 
 tjhe workmen with the industrial treasures of the Exhi- 
 bition, but of removing from the relations of the two 
 countries the old leaven of international discord and 
 jealousy. In the course of their visit the French dele- 
 gates were entertained by some of their English brethren 
 at the Freemasons' Tavern, where views as to the identity 
 of the interests of labour, and the necessity for common 
 action in promoting them, were interchanged. 
 
 In the following year a second deputation of French 
 workmen crossed the Channel. Napoleon was interested 
 in the Polish insurrection of 1863, and it was part of 
 his' policy to encourage the expression of opinion in 
 favour of an intervention in Poland by the Western 
 Powers. At this visit wishes for the restoration of Poland 
 and for general congresses in the interest of laboni 
 against capital were expressed. Nothing decisive, how- 
 ever, was done till 1864, when on the 28th September 
 a great public meeting of working men of all nations 
 was held in St. Martin's Hall, London. Professor 
 Beesly presided, and Karl Marx was present. The 
 meeting resulted in the appointment of a provisional 
 committee to draw up the constitution of the new asso- 
 ciation. This committee consisted of fifty representa- 
 tives of different nations, the English forming about 
 half of its number. 
 
i66 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 The work of drafting tlie constitutioii was first of all 
 undertaken by Mazzini, but the ideas and methods of 
 the Italian patriot were not suited to the task of founding 
 an international association of labour. The statutes he 
 drew up were adapted to the political conspiracy, con- 
 ducted by a strong central authority, in which he had 
 spent his life ; he was strongly opposed to the antagon- 
 ism of classes, and his economic ideas were vague. 
 Marx, on the other hand, was in entire sympathy with 
 the most advanced labour movement — had indeed already 
 done much to mould and direct it ; to him, therefore, 
 the duty of drawing up a constitution was transferred. 
 The inaugural address and the statutes drawn up by 
 him were unanimously adopted by the committee. 
 
 In the inaugural address * three points were particu- 
 larly emphasised. First, Marx contended that, not- 
 withstanding the enormous development of industry 
 and of national wealth since 1848, the misery of the 
 masses had not diminished. Secondly, the successful 
 struggle for the ten-hours working-day meant the 
 break-down of the political economy of the middle 
 classes, the competitive operation of supply and demand 
 requiring to be regulated by social control. Thirdly, 
 the productive association of a few daring " hands " had 
 proved that industry on a great scale, and with all the 
 apphances of modern science, could be carried on with- 
 out the existence of capitalist masters ; and that wage- 
 labour, like slave-labour, was only a transitory form, 
 destined to disappear before associated labour, which 
 
 * For the official documents connected with the International, see 
 R. Meyer's Mnancipationskampfdes vierten Standee, vol. i. 2nd ed. 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL 167 
 
 gives to the workman a diligent hand, a cheerful spirit, 
 and a joyful heart. 
 
 The numbers ot the workmen gave them the means 
 of success, but it could be realised only through union. 
 It was the task of the International to bring about such 
 an effective union, and for this end the workmen must 
 take international politics into their own hands, must 
 watch the diplomacy of their Governments, and uphold 
 the simple rules of morality in the relations of private 
 persons and nations. ' The struggle for such a policy 
 forms part of the struggle for the emancipation of the 
 working-class ; proletarians of all lands, unite ! ' 
 
 The preamble to the statutes contains implicitly the 
 leading principles of international socialism. The 
 economic subjection of the workmen to the appropriator 
 of the instruments of labour — ^that is, of the sources of 
 life — is the cause of servitude in all its forms, of social 
 misery, of mental degradation and political dependence ; 
 the economic emancipation of the working-class is 
 the great aim to which every political movement must 
 be subordinated; the emancipation of the working- 
 class is neither a local nor a national, but a social 
 problem, to be solved only by the combined effort of the 
 most advanced nations. 
 
 'For these reasons the International Association of 
 Working-men has been founded. It declares : 
 
 'That all societies and individuals who adhere to it 
 recognise truth, justice, and morality as the rule of their 
 conduct towards one another, and to all men without 
 distinction of colour, faith, or nationality. No duties 
 without rights; no rights without duties. 
 
i68 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Such are the leading ideas of the preamble ; we have 
 only to develop them, and we have the programme of 
 international socialism. Whatever . opinion we may 
 hold of the truth and practicability of the theories set 
 forth in it, we must respect the lucid and masterly 
 form in which Marx has presented them. It is seldom 
 in the history of the world that talents and learning so 
 remarkable have been placed at the service of an 
 agitation that was so wide and far-reaching. 
 
 The International Association was founded for the 
 establishment of a centre of union and of systematic co- 
 operation between the working-men societies, which 
 follow the same aim — viz., the protection, the progress, 
 and the complete emancipation of the working-class. It 
 would be a mistake to regard its organisation as one of 
 excessive centralisation and dictatorial authority. It 
 was to be a means of union, a centre of information 
 and initiative, in the interests of labour ; but the exist- 
 ing societies which should join it were to retain their 
 organisation intact. 
 
 A General Council, having its seat in London, was 
 appointed. While the president, treasurer, and general 
 secretary were to be Englishmen, each nation was to be 
 represented in the Council by a corresponding secretary. 
 The General Council was to summon annual congresses 
 and exercise an effective control over the affairs of the 
 Association, but local societies were to have free play in 
 all local questions. As a further means of union, it was 
 recommended that the workmen of the various countries 
 should be united in national bodies, represented by 
 national central organs, but no independent local 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL 169 
 
 society was to be excluded from direct correspondence 
 with the General Council. It will be seen that the 
 arrangements of the Association were so made as to 
 secure the efficiency of the central directing power on 
 the one hand, and on the other to allow local and 
 national associations a real freedom and abundant scope 
 for adapting themselves to the peculiar tasks imposed 
 on them by their local and national position. 
 
 As in founding, so in conducting the International, 
 Marx took the leading part. The proceedings of the 
 various congresses might be described as a discussion, 
 elucidation, and filling up of the programme sketched 
 by him in the inaugural address and in the statutes of 
 the Association.. Men representing the schools of 
 Proudhon (who died in 1865), of Blanqui, and Bakunin 
 also exercised considerable influence ; but the general 
 tendency was in accordance with the views of Marx. 
 
 It was intended that the first congress for finally 
 arranging the constitution of the Association should be 
 held at Brussels in 1865, but the Belgian Government 
 forbade the meeting, and the Council had to content 
 itself with a conference in London. The first congress 
 was held at Geneva in September 1866, sixty delegates 
 being present. Here the statutes as drafted by Marx 
 were adopted. Among other resolutions, it decided on 
 an agitation in favour of the gradual reduction of the 
 working day to eight hours, and it recommended a most 
 comprehensive system of education, intellectual and 
 technical, which would raise the working people above 
 the level of the higher and middle classes. Socialistic 
 principles were set forth only in the most general 
 
170 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 terms. With regard to labour the International did 
 not seek to enunciate a doctrinaire system, but only 
 to proclaim general -principles. They must aim at free 
 co-operation, and for this end the decisive power in the 
 State must be transferred from capitalists and landlords 
 to the workers. 
 
 The proposal of the French delegates for the exclusion 
 of the intellectual proletariat from the Association, led 
 to an interesting discussion. Was this proletariat to 
 be reckoned among the workers? Ambitious talkers 
 and agitators belonging to this class had done much 
 mischief. On the other hand, their exclusion from 
 socialistic activity would have deprived the labourers of 
 the services of most of their greatest leaders, and the 
 intellectual proletariat suffered from the pressure of 
 capital quite as much as any other class of workers. The 
 proposal for their exclusion was rejected. 
 
 The second congress, held at Lausanne in 1 867, made 
 considerable progress in the formulating of the socialistic 
 theories'. It was resolved that the means of transport 
 and communication should become the property of the 
 State, in order to break the mighty monopoly of the 
 great companies, under which the subjection of labour 
 does violence to human worth and personal freedom. 
 The congress encouraged co-operative associations and 
 efforts for the raising of wages, but emphatically called 
 attention to the danger lest the spread of such 
 associations should be found compatible with the 
 existing system, thus resulting in the formation of 
 a fourth class, and of an entirely miserable fifth. 
 The social transformation can be radically and defi- 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL 171 
 
 nitely accomplished only by working on the whole of 
 society in thorough accordance with reciprocity and 
 justice. 
 
 In the third congress, held at Brussels in September 
 1868, the socialistic principles which had all along been 
 implicitly contained in the aims and utterances of the 
 International received most explicit statement. Ninety- 
 eight delegates, representing England, France, Germany, 
 Belgium, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, assembled at 
 this congress. It resolved that mines and forests and 
 the land, as well as all the means of transport and 
 communication, should become the common property of 
 society or of the democratic State, and that they should 
 by the State be handed over to associations of workers, 
 who should utilise them under rational and equitable 
 conditions determined by society. It was further 
 resolved that the producers could gain possession of the 
 machines only through co-operative societies and the 
 organisation of the mutual credit system, the latter 
 clause being a concession apparently to the followers of 
 Proudhon. After proposing a scheme for the better 
 organising of strikes, the congress returned to the 
 question of education, particularly emphasising the fact 
 that an indispensable condition towards a thorough sys- 
 tem of scientific, professional, and productive instruc- 
 tion was the reduction of the hours of labour. 
 
 The fundamental principle, ' to labour the full product 
 of labour,' was recognised in the following resolution : 
 'Every society founded on democratic principles re- 
 pudiates all appropriation by capital, whether in the 
 form of rent, interest, profit, or in any other form or 
 
172 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 manner whatsoever. Labour must have its full right 
 and entire reward.' 
 
 In view of the struggle imminent between France 
 and Germany, the congress made an emphatic declara- 
 tion, denouncing it as a civil war in favour of Russia, 
 and calling upon the workers to resist all war as 
 systematic murder. In case of war the congress 
 recommended a universal strike. It reckoned on the 
 solidarity of the workers of all lands for this strike of 
 the peoples against war. 
 
 At the Congress of Basel in September 1869, little 
 remained for the International to accomplish in further 
 defining the socialistic position. The resolution for 
 transforming land from privMe to collective property 
 was repeated. A proposal to abolish the right of 
 inheritance failed to obtain a majority, for while thirty- 
 two delegates voted for the abolition, twenty-three were 
 against it, and seventeen declined to vote.* 
 
 If we now turn from the congresses of the Inter- 
 national to consider the history of its influence in 
 Europe, we shall see that its success was very consider- 
 able. It gained its first triumph in the effectual support 
 of the bronze-workers at Paris during their lock-out in 
 1867; and it repeatedly gave real help to the English 
 trades unionists by preventing the importation of cheap 
 labour from the Continent. At the beginning of 1868 
 one hundred and twenty-two working-men's societies 
 of South Germany, assembled at Nuremberg, de- 
 clared their adhesion to the International. In 1870 
 Cameron announced himself as the representative of 
 * Oscar Testu, D Inlernationale, p. 153. 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL 173 
 
 800,000 American workmen who had adopted its 
 principles. 
 
 It soon spread as far east as Poland and Hungary ; 
 it had affiliated societies, with journals devoted to its 
 cause, in every country of Western Europe. The lead- 
 ing organs of the European press became more than 
 interested in its movements ; The Times published four 
 leaders on the Brussels Congress. It was supposed to 
 be concerned in all the revolutionary movements and 
 agitations of Europe, thus gaining a world-historic 
 notoriety as the rallying-point of social overthrow and 
 ruin. Its prestige, however, was always based more on 
 the vast possibilities of the cause it represented than on 
 its actual power. Its organisation was loose, its finan- 
 cial resources insignificant; the Continental unionists 
 joined it more in the hope of borrowing than of con- 
 tributing support. 
 
 In 1870 the International resolved to meet at the old 
 hearth of the revolutionary movement by holding its 
 annual congress in Paris. This plan was rendered 
 abortive by the Franco-German war. The war, how- 
 ever, helped to bring the principles of the Association 
 more prominently before the world. During the Austro- 
 German struggle of 1866 the International had declared 
 its emphatic condemnation of war; and now the affiliated 
 societies of France and Germany, as well as the General 
 Council at London, uttered a solemn protest against a 
 renewal of the scourge. Some of its German adherents 
 likewise incurred the wrath of the authorities by ven- 
 turing to protest against the annexation of Alsace and 
 Lorraine. 
 
174 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 All will agree that it is a happier omen for the 
 future that the democracy of labour as represented by 
 the International was so prompt and courageous in its 
 denunciation of the evils of war. It gives us ground to 
 hope that as the influence of the democracy prevails in 
 the council of nations the passion for war may decline. 
 On this high theme no men have a better right to speak 
 than the workers, for they have in all ages borne the 
 heaviest of the burden of privation and suffering imposed 
 on the world by the military spirit, and have had the 
 least share in the miserable glories which victory may 
 obtain. 
 
 The relation of the International to the rising of the 
 Commune at Paris in 1871 is often misunderstood. It 
 is clear that the International, as such, had no part either 
 in originating or conducting -the Commune; some of 
 the French members joined it, but only on their indi- 
 vidual responsibility. Its complicity after the event is 
 equally clear. After the fall of the Commune, Karl 
 Marx, in the name of the General Council, wrote a long 
 and trenchant manifesto commending it as substantially 
 a government of the working-class, whose measures 
 tended really to advance the interests of the working- 
 class. "The Paris of the workers, with its Commune, 
 will ever be celebrated as the glorious herald of a new 
 society. Its martyrs will be enshrined in the great 
 heart of the working-class. History has already nailed 
 its destroyers on the pillory, from which all the prayers 
 of their priests are impotent to deliver them." * 
 
 The Commune was undoubtedly a rising for the 
 * Der Bij/rgerkrieg in Frankreich. 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL 175 
 
 autonomy of Paris, supported chiefly by the lower classes. 
 It was a protest against excessive centralisation raised 
 by the democracy of Paris, which has always been far 
 in advance of the provinces, and which found itself in 
 possession of arms after the siege of the city by the 
 Germans. But while it was prominently an assertion 
 of local self-government, it was also a revolt against the 
 economic oppression of the moneyed classes. Many of 
 its measures were what we should call social-radical. 
 
 In two important points, therefore, the communal 
 rising at Paris had a very close affinity with socialism. 
 In the first place, it was a revolutionary assertion of the 
 Commune or local unit of self-government as the 
 cardinal and dominating principle of society over 
 against the State or central government. That is to 
 say, the Commune was a vindication of the political 
 form which is necessary for the development of social- 
 ism, the self-governing group of workers. And. in the 
 second place, the Commune was a rising chiefly of the 
 proletariat, the class of which socialism claims to be the 
 special champion, which in Paris only partially saw the 
 way of deliverance, but was weary of oppression and 
 full of indignation against the middle-class adventurers, 
 that had on the fall of the Empire seized the central 
 government of Prance. 
 
 It would, however, be a mistake to assume for the 
 Commune a clearness and comprehensiveness of aim 
 which it did not really possess. We should not be 
 justified in saying that the Commune had any definite 
 consciousness of such an historical mission as has been 
 claimed for it. The fearful shock caused by the over- 
 
176 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 whelming events of the Franco-German war had naturally 
 led to wide-spread confusion and uncertainty in the 
 French mind; and those who undertook to direct it, 
 whether in Paris or elsewhere, had painfully to grope 
 their way towards the renovation of the country. At a 
 time when it could hardly be said that France had a 
 regular government, the Commune seized the oppor- 
 tunity to make a new political departure. The true 
 history of its doings will, we hope, be written after pas- 
 sion and prejudice have sufficiently subsided to admit 
 of it. The story of its rise and fall was only one phase 
 of a sad series of troubles and disasters, which happily 
 do not often overtake nations in so terrible a form. 
 
 From this point the decline and fall of the Associa- 
 tion must be dated. The English trades unions, intent 
 on more practical concerns at home, never took a deep 
 interest in its proceedings ; the German socialists were 
 disunited among themselves, lacking in funds, and 
 hampered by the police. 
 
 It found its worst enemies perhaps in its own 
 household. In 1869, Bakunin, with a following of 
 anarchists, had joined the International, and from the 
 first found themselves at variance with the majority led 
 by Marx. It can hardly be maintained that Marx 
 favoured a very strongly centralising authority, yet, as 
 his views and methods were naturally entirely repugnant 
 to the anarchists, a breach was inevitable. 
 
 The breach came at the Hague Congress in 
 September 1872. Sixty -five delegates were present, 
 including Marx himself, who with his followers, after 
 animated discussion, expelled the anarchist party, and 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL 177 
 
 then removed the seat of the General Council to New 
 York. The congress concluded with a meeting at 
 Amsterdam, of which the chief feature was a remark- 
 able speech from Marx. ' In the eighteenth century, 
 he said, ' kings and potentates used to assemble at the 
 Hague to discuss the interests of their dynasties. At 
 the same place we resolved to hold the assize of 
 labour' — a contrast which with world-historic force did 
 undoubtedly mark the march of time. ' He could not 
 deny that there were countries, like America, England — 
 and, as far as he knew its institutions, Holland also — 
 where the workmen could attain their goal by peaceful 
 means ; but in most European countries force must be 
 the lever of revolution, and to force they must appeal 
 when the time came.' Thus it was a principle of Marx 
 to prefer peaceful methods where peaceful methods are 
 permitted, but resort to force must be made when 
 necessary. Force also is an economic power. He 
 concluded by expressing his resolve that in the future, 
 as in the past, his life would be consecrated to the 
 triumph of the social cause. 
 
 The transfer of the General Council of the Marx 
 International from London to New York was the 
 beginning of the end. It survived just long enough to 
 hold another congress at Geneva in 1873, and then 
 quietly expired. The party of destruction, styling 
 themselves autoTiomists and led by Bakunin, had a 
 bloodier history. The programme of this party, as we 
 shall see in our chapter on Anarchism, was to overturn 
 all existing institutions, with the view to reconstructing 
 them on a communal basis. This it endeavoured to 
 
 12 
 
178 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 realise by the great communal risings in southern Spain 
 in. 1873, when its adherents set up their special form of 
 government at Barcelona, Seville, Cadiz, and Carta- 
 gena — at the last-mentioned place also seizing on 
 part of the iron-clad fleet of Spain. The risings were 
 suppressed, not without difficulty, by the national 
 troops. The autonomists had a lingering existence till 
 
 1879. 
 
 In its main practical aim, to serve as a common 
 centre for the combined efforts of working-men of all 
 nations towards their universal emancipation, the Inter- 
 national had only a moderate and a transitory success. 
 It was a great idea, for which the times were not ripe. 
 How effectually organise so many millions of working- 
 men, of different countries, at different stages of social 
 development — men ignorant of each other's language, 
 with little leisure, without funds for travelling and 
 purposes of propaganda ? It was inevitable that some 
 such effort should be made ; for we need not repeat 
 that labour has international interests of vital and 
 supreme importance. And we may feel assured that 
 the attempt will be renewed. But on the vast scale 
 contemplated by the International it was at least 
 preinature, and inasmuch as it drew the attention of 
 the workmen from practical measures to far distant 
 and perhaps Utopian aims, and engaged them in 
 revolutionary schemes for which the times were not 
 reaidy, even if they were otherwise desirable, its 
 influence was not salutary. 
 
 In a movement so momentous, however, it is 
 important to have taken the first step, and the Inter- 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL 179 
 
 national took more than the first step. It proclaimed a 
 great cause in the face of the world — the cause of the 
 poor man, the cause of the suflFering and oppressed 
 millions of labour. As an instrument of propaganda, 
 as a proclamation of a great cause with possibilities of 
 vast and continual growth, it has had a world-historic 
 significance, and teaches lessons from which all govern- 
 ments and all men may learn. Its great mission was 
 propaganda, and in that it has succeeded marvellously. 
 Largely by means of it, the ideas of Marx and his 
 associates are making the tour of the world. The 
 governments most menaced by the social revolution, 
 and most antagonistic to its principles, must perforce 
 have regard to the questions raised by the Interna- 
 tional. It is a movement that will not rest, but will 
 in many ways, and for many a year, claim the attention 
 of the world. 
 
 Though the International is dead, its spirit is still 
 living. The principles it proclaimed continue to 
 exercise the thoughts of men. It has placed before 
 the world a whole group of problems for study, for 
 experiment, to be pursued through doubt, struggle, and 
 agony, to some kind of wise and beneficial solution, we 
 fervently hope. 
 
 We should not be discouraged by the fact that the 
 efforts made for the solution of the questions of the 
 world have so often been so hopelessly incommensurate 
 with the greatness of the task which they attempted. 
 In beginning these high endeavours, men have always 
 been like children groping in the dark. Yet the 
 failures of one generation have frequently shown the 
 
i«o A HISTORY OT SOCIALISM 
 
 way to success in the next. The International at- 
 tempted the great task of the present epoch of the 
 world in its most difiScult form. We need not be 
 surprised that its success was partial ; and we may 
 with confidence expect that the lessons taught by it 
 will prove most helpful for the future. 
 
 No association, styling itself International and 
 fulfilling the same functions, now exists. But the 
 ■ various socialistic societies all over the world are fully 
 conscious of the international character of the move- 
 ment in which they are engaged. Without a formal 
 organisation they represent the claims and aspirations 
 of the same class, have common sympathies and 
 pursue like aims. While difEering greatly in methods 
 of action, and even in principle, they belong to the 
 same stream of historic eflbrt and tendency. 
 
 This international movement, however, still finds 
 expression in congresses representing the difierent 
 countries. Such was the congress at Ghent in 1877, 
 which was not marked by any noteworthy feature. 
 Greatest of all the socialist congresses ever held were 
 those which assembled at Paris in 1889, the centenary 
 of the Eevolution, on the 14th of July, the anniversary of 
 the fall of the Bastille. There were two congresses, 
 one representing, as far as any difference of principle 
 was concerned, the more uncompromising Marx school, 
 the other consisting of delegates who are not indisposed 
 to co-operate with other democratic parties. But the 
 cleavage of principle was by no means definite ; the 
 difference between the two meetings originated largely 
 in personal matters, especially as regards the French 
 
THE INTERNATIONAL i8i 
 
 socialist parties, which issued the invitations. The 
 immediate occasion of disagreement related to tha 
 manner of proving the mandates of the members. 
 Both congresses advocated an energetic collectivism, 
 while both also urged more practical measures for the 
 protection of labour, such as Sunday rest, an eight- 
 hours working-day, &c. Each congress consisted of 
 about six hundred delegates from the various countries 
 of the civilised world. 
 
 After being alarmed by an International of Workers, 
 the world has been recently startled by the project for 
 an International of Governments. In 1889 the Swiss 
 Government brought forward a proposal for an Inter- 
 national Conference on Labour of the countries most 
 interested in industrial competition. The question 
 assumed a new aspect when, early in 1890, the young 
 Emperor of Germany issued rescripts, one of which 
 contained the same proposal. Naturally, the matters 
 presented for discussion by the Emperor covered only a 
 small part of the ground occupied by the International 
 of Workers. The protection of adult labour, except in 
 mines, was excluded from the business of the conference, 
 Sunday labour, the protection of women, children, and 
 young persons, were the chief questions laid before the 
 meeting. There can be no doubt that the conference 
 has given a much-needed and a beneficial stimulus to 
 legislation for the protection of labour in civilised 
 countries. 
 
 But the main result of the conference is the recog- 
 nition by the Governments of the fact that there are 
 labour questions of vast importance, and that these 
 
i82 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 questions have international aspects which can no 
 longer be ignored. Let us hope that it may be the 
 beginning of better things. In the course of human 
 improvement we may hope that the question of the 
 needs and rights of labour will ever take a large place 
 beside the concerns of war and diplomacy, and that it 
 will eventually supersede them. The workers have a 
 growing influence at . the elections in civilised coun- 
 tries. It is their duty to press their just claims on the 
 Governments, and so to bring about that desirable 
 consummation. 
 
OHAPTEE IX. 
 
 ANARCHISM 
 
 It is agreed that anarchism as a form of socialism 
 originated with Proudhon ; but the theory owes its 
 fuller development chiefly to Russian agitators. The 
 great apostle of the system in its most characteristic 
 stage was Michael Bakunin. 
 
 Bakunin * belonged , to the highest Russian aris- 
 tocracy and was born at Torshok, in the government of 
 Twer, in 1 8 14. In due time he entered the army as 
 an officer of artillery, which was a select department of 
 the service. While serving in Poland, however, he was 
 so painfully impressed with the horrors which he saw 
 exercised under Russian despotic rule, that he resigned 
 his commission and entered on a life of study. In 
 1847 he visited Paris, and met Proudhon, who had a 
 decisive influence on his opinions. 
 
 The revolutionary movement of 1848 gave the first 
 opportunity for the activity of Bakunin as agitator. 
 He was particularly concerned in the- disturbances at 
 Dresden in 1849. But the hands of the reactionary 
 
 * The detailed Life of Bakunin, promised by Caflero and ElisSe 
 Eeclus in the preface to God and the State, has apparently not yet 
 been published. Hence the above meagre accouni of his life. 
 
i84 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Governments and of their police were heavy on the baffled 
 enthusiasts of the Revolution. Bakunin had a full 
 share of their bitter experience. As he tells us himself 
 in his work on Mazzini, he was for nearly eight years 
 confined in various fortresses of Saxony, Austria, and 
 Russia, and was then exiled for life to Siberia. 
 Fortunately, Muravieff, Governor of Siberia, was a 
 relative, who allowed him considerable freedom and 
 other indulgences. After four years of exile, Bakunin 
 effected his escape, and through the greatest hardships 
 made his way to California, and thence to London in 
 i860. 
 
 Bakunin thus passed in prison and in exile the 
 dreary years of European reaction which followed the 
 revolutionary period of 1848. When he returned to 
 London he found that the forward movement had 
 again begun. It was a time of promise for his own 
 country after the accession of Alexander II. to the 
 throne. In the Kolokol he assisted Herzen to rouse 
 his countrymen and prepare them for a new era ; but the 
 impatient temperament of Bakunin could not be satisfied 
 with the comparatively moderate counsels followed by his 
 friend. The latter years of his life he spent, chiefly in 
 Switzerland, as the energetic advocate of international 
 anarchism. In 1869 he founded the Social Democratic 
 Alliance, which, however, dissolved in the same year, 
 and entered the main International. He attempted a 
 rising at Lyons in September 1870, soon after the fall 
 of the Second Empire, but with no success whatever. 
 At the Hague Congress of the International he was 
 outvoted and expelled by the Marx party. His activity 
 
ANARCHISM 185 
 
 in later years was much impaired by ill-health. He died 
 at Berne in 1876. 
 
 lu their preface to Bakunin'a work, God and the State, 
 his friends Cafiero and Elis^e Reclus afford ns some 
 interesting glimpses of the ^jersonality of the agitator. 
 ' Friends and enemies know that the man was great by 
 his thinking power, his force of will, and his persistent 
 energy ; they know also what lofty disdain he felt for 
 fortune, rank, glory, and all the miserable prizes which 
 the majority of men are base enough to coyet. A 
 Russian gentleman belonging to the highest nobility of 
 the empire, he was one of the first to enter in that 
 proud association of the revolted, who knew to detach 
 themselves from the traditions, the prejudices, the 
 interests of race and class — to contemn their own 
 happiness. With them he fought the hard battle of 
 life, aggravated by prison, by exile, by all the dangers, 
 and all the bitterness which devoted men have to 
 undergo in their troubled existence.' They then go on 
 to say how ' in Russia among the students, in Germany 
 among the insurgents of Dresden, in Siberia among his 
 brethren in exile, in America, in England, in Prance, in 
 Switzerland, in Italy, among men of goodwill, his 
 direct influence has been considerable. The originality 
 of his ideas, his picturesque and fiery eloquence, his 
 untiring zeal in propaganda, supported by the natural 
 majesty of his appearance, and by his strong vitality, 
 gained an entrance for him in all the groups of 
 revolutionary socialists, and his activity left deep 
 traces even among those who, after having welcomed it, 
 rejected it because of differences in aim or method,' 
 
i86 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 But it was mainly by the voluminous correspondence 
 with the revolutionary world, in which he spent whole 
 nights, that his activity is to be explained. His 
 published writings were the smallest part of his work. 
 His most important treatise, God and the State, was 
 only a fragment. ' My life itself is a fragment,' he said 
 to those who criticised his writings. 
 
 Nothing can be clearer or more frank and com- 
 prehensive in its destructiveness than the socialism of 
 Bakunin. It is revolutionary socialism based on 
 materialism, and aiming at the destruction of external 
 authority by every available means. He rejects all the 
 ideal systems in every name and shape, from the idea 
 of God downwards ; and he rejects every form of 
 external authority, whether emanating from the will of 
 a Sovereign or from universal suffrage. ' The liberty of 
 man,' he says in his Dieu et I'Etat, ' consists solely in 
 this, that he obey the laws of Nature, because he has 
 himself recognised them as such, and not because they 
 have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign 
 will whatsover, human or divine, collective or individual.' 
 In this way will the whole problem of freedom be 
 solved : that natural laws be ascertained by scientific 
 discovery, and the knowledge of them be universally 
 diffused among the masses. Natural laws being thus 
 recognised by every man for himself, he cannot but 
 obey them, for they are the laws also of his own nature ; 
 and the need for political organisation, administration, 
 and legislation will at once disappear. 
 
 It follows that he will not admit of any privileged 
 position or class, for ' it is the peculiarity of privilege 
 
ANARCHISM 187 
 
 and of every privileged position to kill the intellect and 
 heart of man. The privileged man, whether he be 
 privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved 
 in intellect and heart.' 'In a word, we object to all 
 legislation, all authority, and all influence, privileged, 
 patented, official, and legal, even when it has proceeded 
 from universal sufirage, convinced that it must always 
 turn to the profit of a dominating and exploiting 
 minority, against the interests of the immense majority 
 enslaved.' 
 
 The following extracts taken from the programme of 
 the International Social Democratic Alliance, which he 
 founded, will help to complete our knowledge of the 
 views of this extraordinary agitator. The Alliance 
 declares itself atheistic; it seeks the abolition of all 
 religions, the displacement of faith by science and of 
 divine justice by human justice, the abolition of 
 marriage as a political, religious, legal, and bourgeois 
 institution. The Alliance demands above all things the 
 definitive and complete abolition of classes, and political, 
 economic, and social equality of individuals and sexes, 
 and abolition of inheritance, so that in the future every 
 man may enjoy a like share in the produce of labour ; 
 that land and soil, instruments of labour, and all other 
 capital, becoming the common property of the whole 
 society, may be used only by the workers — that is, by 
 associations of cultivators and industrialists. It looks 
 forward to the final solution of the social question 
 through the universal and international solidarity of the 
 workers of all countries, and condemns every policy 
 grounded on so-called patriotism and national jealousy. 
 
i88 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 It demands the universal federation of all local associa- 
 tions through the principle of freedom. 
 
 Bakunin's methods of realising his revolutionary pro- 
 gramme are suited to his principles. He would make 
 all haste to sweep away the political and social 
 institutions that prevent the realisation of his plans for 
 the future. The spirit of destruction reaches its climax 
 in the Revolutionary Catechism, which has been 
 attributed to Bakunin, but which contains extreme 
 statements that do not consist with his acknowledged 
 writings. It is at least a product of the school of 
 Bakunin, and as such is worthy of attention. The 
 spirit of revolution could not further go than it does in 
 this document. The revolutionist, as the Catechism 
 would recommend him to be, is a consecrated man, who 
 will allow no private interests or feelings, and no 
 scruples of religion, patriotism, or morality, to turn him 
 aside from his mission, the aim of which is by all 
 available means to overturn the existing society. His 
 work is merciless and universal destruction. The future 
 organisation will doubtless proceed out of the movement 
 and life of the people, but it is the concern of coming 
 generations. In the meantime all that Bakunin enables 
 us to see as promise of future re-construction is the free 
 federation of free associations — associations of which wa 
 find the type in the Russian commune. 
 
 The influence of Bakunin was felt chiefly on the 
 socialist movement in Southern Europe. The im- 
 portant risings in Spain in 1873 were due to his 
 activity. In the later revolutionary movement of Italy 
 his influence superseded that of Mazzini, for there, as 
 
ANARCHISM 189 
 
 elsewhere, the purely pohtical interest had yielded to 
 the social in the minds of the most advanced. 
 
 The doctrines of Bakunin have also left their mark 
 on the recent social history of France and French 
 Switzerland. About 1879 the anarchist propaganda 
 showed signs of activity in Lyons and the sur- 
 rounding industrial centres. Some disturbances among 
 the miners at Montceau-les-Mines in 1882 also pro- 
 voked the attention of the police and Government, 
 with the result that sixty-six persons were accused of 
 belonging to an international association with anarchist 
 principles. Of the accused the most notable was Prince 
 Kropotkine, who, with the eminent French geographer 
 Blis^e EecluB and the Eussian Lavroff , may be regarded 
 as the greatest living exponents of anarchism. 
 
 There is no more interesting figure in the recent 
 revolutionary history of Europe than Prince Kropot- 
 kine. Like Bakunin, he belongs by birth to the 
 highest aristocracy of Eussia ; his family, it was some- 
 times said among his familiar friends, had a better 
 right to the throne of that country than the present 
 dynasty. A man of science, of European fame, of 
 kindly nature and courteous manners, it may seem 
 strange that he should be an avowed champion of the 
 most destructive creed now extant. A few of the 
 leading facts of his life, as he gave them in his defence 
 at the trial at Lyons in 1883, may throw some light on 
 that question.* His father was owner of serfs, and 
 from his childhood he had been witness to scenes like 
 those narrated by the American novelist in Uncle 
 * ProcU des Ana/rchistes, p. 97. 
 
igo A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 Tom's Cabin. The sight of the cruelties suffered by 
 the oppressed class had taught him to love them. At 
 sixteen he entered the school of pages, and if he 
 had learned in the cabin to love the people, he 
 learned at the Court to detest the great. In the army 
 and the administration he saw the hopelessness of ex- 
 pecting reforms from the reactionary Russian Govern- 
 ment. For some time afterwards he had devoted 
 himself to scientific work. When the social movement 
 began, Kropotkine joined it. The demands made by 
 the new party for more liberty met with a simple 
 response from the Government : they were thrown into 
 prison, where their treatment was terrible. In the 
 prison where the Prince was detained nine lost their 
 reason and eleven committed suicide. He fell seriously 
 ill, and was carried to the hospital, from which he made 
 his escape. In Switzerland, where he found refuge, 
 he witnessed the sufferings of the people caused by the 
 crisis in the watch manufacture : everywhere the like 
 miseries, due to the like social and political evils. 
 Was it surprising that he should seek to remedy them 
 by the transformation of society ? 
 
 The record* of the great anarchist trial at Lyons 
 in 1883, to which we have already referred, is an 
 historical document of the first importance. Every 
 one who wishes to understand the causes, motives, and 
 aims of the anarchist movement should study it care- 
 fully. Here are a few extracts from a declaration of 
 opinion signed by the accused. What they aim at is 
 the most absolute freedom, the most complete satisfac- 
 * Le Prods des Anarchistes, Lyons, 1883. 
 
ANARCHISM 191 
 
 tion of human wants, without other limit than the 
 impossibilities of Nature and the wants of their neigh- 
 bours, equally worthy of respect. They object to all 
 authority and all government on principle, and in all 
 human relations would, in place of legal and adminis- 
 trative control, substitute free contract, perpetually 
 subject to revision and cancelment. But, as no freedom 
 is possible in a society where capital is monopolised by 
 a diminishing minority, they believe that capital, the 
 common inheritance of humanity, since it is the fruit 
 of the co-operation of past and present generations, 
 ought to be at the disposal of all, so that no man be 
 excladed from it, and no man seize part of it to the 
 detriment of the rest. In a word, they wish equality, 
 equality of fact, as corollary, or rather as primordial 
 condition of freedom. From each one according to his 
 faculties; to each one according to his needs. They 
 demand bread for all, science for all, work for all ; for 
 all, too, independence and justice. 
 
 As one of the accused maintained, even a Govern- 
 ment based on universal suffrage gives them no scope 
 for effective action in the deliverance of the poor, as of 
 the eight million electors of France only some half a 
 million are in a position to give a free vote. In such 
 a state of affairs, and in view of the continued misery 
 and degradation of the proletariat, they proclaim the 
 sacred right of insurrection as the ultima ratio ser- 
 vorum. 
 
 The whole anarchist doctrine may be reduced to 
 three heads : (i) Economically it is a collectivism, 
 which is common to it with the prevalent socialism, and 
 
192 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 therefore need not detain us here ; (2) as a theory of 
 revolutionary action, which is certainly its characteristic 
 feature ; (3) as a theory of the relation of the individual 
 to law or government. 
 
 Little need be said in the way of criticism of the 
 details of the ultra-revolutionary programme of the 
 anarchists. In our chapter on Marx we have already 
 indicated that the materialism which is common to 
 both schools cannot now be regarded as a tenable or 
 admissible theory of the world. With regard to re- 
 ligion and marriage, it is hardly necessary to state that 
 progress lies, not in. the abolition, but in the purification 
 and elevation of those great factors of human life. 
 Bakunin's criticism of religion is simply a tissue of 
 confusion and misconception. Marriage is a funda- 
 mental institution, on the purity and soundness of 
 which social health and social progress must above all 
 things depend : in this matter, more than almost any 
 other, society must and should insist on the mainte- 
 nance of due safeguards and regulations. Free love is 
 a specious and delusive theory, which would tend to 
 bring back social chaos. It would certainly establish a 
 new slavery of women, whose needs and rights would 
 be sacrificed in the name of a hollow and disastrous 
 freedom. 
 
 In its leading principle, the negation of government 
 and external authority, the anarchy of Bakunin is 
 essentially the same as that of Proudhon. But in 
 Proudhon the principle was set forth in paradox, 
 whereas Bakunin expounds it with perfect frankness 
 and directness, and with a revolutionary energy which 
 
ANARCHISM 193 
 
 has seldom been equalled in history. What they both 
 contemplate is a condition of human enlightenment 
 and self-control in which the individual shall be a law 
 to himself, and in which all external authority shall 
 be abolished as a despotic interference with personal 
 freedom. It is an ideal to which the highest religion 
 and philosophy look forward as the goal of man, not 
 as one, however, which can be forthwith reached 
 through the wholesale destruction of the present 
 framework of society, but through a long process of 
 ethical and social improvement. The error of the 
 anarchists consists in their impatient insistence on 
 this proclamation of absolute freedom in the present 
 debased condition of the great mass of the people in 
 every class. They insist on taking the last step in 
 social development before they have quite taken the 
 first. 
 
 Like its collectivism, the theory of freedom is not a 
 special feature of anarchism. Collectivism is simply 
 the economic side of the prevalent socialism generally. 
 Its theory of freedom is a very old theory, which we 
 should not misunderstand because of the strange con- 
 nection in which we here find it. It is a high and 
 long-cherished ideal of the best and greatest minds. 
 The good man does his duty, not from fear of the 
 police or the magistrate, but because it is his duty. 
 And we must regard it as the high-water mark of his 
 probity and goodness that the right is so wrought into 
 the texture of his conscience and intelligence, that the 
 doing of it has become as natural to him as breathing 
 or locomotion. 
 
 13 
 
194 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 It is an ideal, also, which we must cherish for society 
 and for the human race. And not in vain ; for there 
 is an ever-widening circle of human action, in which 
 good and reasonable men do the right without pressure 
 or stimulus from without, either from law or govern- 
 ment. We are therefore to regard a well-ordered, 
 intelligent, and ethical freedom as the goal of the 
 social development of the human race. 
 
 But it is an ideal which must obviously depend for 
 its realisation on the moral and rational development of 
 men. It cannot come till men and the times are ripe 
 for it. No doubt the realisation of it may be hindered 
 by evil iustitutions and reactionary governments ; yet 
 these, too, are merely the outcome of such human nature, 
 as was once prevalent in the countries where we now find 
 them. They have outlived their time. We are certainly 
 right to get rid of them, as of other evil habits and con- 
 ditions of the past, but it is best done when done 
 wisely and reasonably. And it cannot be done in any 
 wise or effectual manner except through a wide organic 
 change in the human beings concerned. 
 
 A moral and rational freedom is therefore the goal of 
 the social development of the world, and it is a goal 
 towards which we must strive even now. But it is a 
 goal that lies far ahead of us. For the present, and in 
 the future with which we have any practical concern, 
 society cannot be maintained without adequate laws, 
 sanctioned and enforced by a regular government. The 
 elimination of the baser elements from human character 
 and human society proceeds with most regrettable slow- 
 ness. In the meantime, therefore, we must hold them 
 
ANARCHISM 195 
 
 in check by the beat available methods. We may im- 
 prove our laws, our police, and magistrates, but we 
 cannot do without them. 
 
 It is an interesting fact that sbcialism has taken its 
 most aggressive form in that European country .whose 
 civilisation is most recent. The revolutionary opinions 
 of Kussia are not the growth of the soil, and are not the 
 natural and normal outcome of its own social develop- 
 ment: they have been imported from abroad. Fall- 
 ing on youthful and enthusiastic temperaments which 
 had not previously been inoculated with the principle 
 of innovation, the new ideas have broken forth with an 
 irrepressible and uncompromising vigour which has 
 astonished the older nations of Europe. Another pecu- 
 liarity of the situation is that the Government is an 
 autocracy served or controlled by a camarilla which has 
 often been largely foreign both in origin and sympathy. 
 In this case, then, we have a revolutionary party in- 
 spired by the socialism of Western Europe fighting 
 against a Government which is also in many ways an 
 exotic,' and is not rooted in the mass of the people. 
 
 The history of Eussia turns on two great institutions, 
 the Tzardom and the mir. The Tzardom is the organ 
 of Russian political life, while the mir is the social 
 formtaken by the agricultural population, and is the 
 economic basis of the nation generally. 
 
 No reasonable man can doubt that the Tzardom has 
 performed a most important function in the historical 
 development of Russia. . It was the central power which 
 united the Russian people and led them in the long, 
 
196 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 severe and successful struggle against Tartars, Turks, 
 Lithuanians, Poles and Swedes. Without it, Eussia 
 would in all probability have suffered the same fate as 
 Poland, which was distracted, weakened, and finally 
 ruined by the anarchy and incurable selfishness of its 
 nobles. 
 
 As in other countries, so in Eussia, the central power 
 was established through the subjection of princes and 
 lords who were crushed by the strong and merciless 
 rule of the Tzars. Among those Tzars, too, were men 
 of originality and courage like Peter the Great, who 
 forced the people out of the old-world grooves which 
 they loved so much ; and when other means failed they 
 did not hesitate to employ the cane, the knout, and the 
 axe of the executioner to urge their nobles into the 
 paths of Western progress. We need not say that the 
 Tzars were not moved by benevolent reasons thus to 
 benefit their subjects. The historic Tzars were not 
 philanthropists or humanitarians. The aim of their 
 reforms was political, to provide the Eussian nation 
 with better means and appliances for the struggle with 
 her neighbours. 
 
 While the nobles were unable to make head against 
 the Tzardom, the clergy were neither able nor disposed 
 so to do. In Eussia the clergy were not backed by a 
 great international power like the Papacy. They were 
 nursed in the traditions of Eastern Greek despotism 
 and had no inclination to resist their rulers. The 
 peasants were not a political power, except at the rare 
 intervals when desperation drove them into rebellion. 
 Thus the circumstances of Eussia have combined to 
 
ANARCHISM 197 
 
 establish an autocracy whicli has performed the greatest 
 historic functions, and which has had a power and 
 solidity without example in the rest of Europe. It has 
 maintained the national existence against fierce and 
 powerful enemies, it has in every generation extended 
 the borders of the Russian power, and has been a real 
 centre of the national life, satisfying the needs and aspi- 
 rations of the people, not in a perfect manner by any 
 means, yet with a considerable measure of success. . If 
 we do not realise the supreme importance of the work 
 that the Tzardom has done for Russia, we cannot under- 
 stand its present position and the hold it has on the 
 feelings of the Russian people. The power of the Tzar 
 ias been such that it was hardly an exaggeration, when 
 the Emperor Paul stated to General Dumouriez that 
 there was no important man among his subjects except 
 the person he happened to speak to, and while he was 
 speaking to him. It is only another instance of the 
 irony of human affairs, however, that the really effective 
 limit to the power of the Tzars is found in the officials, 
 who are intended to carry it into effect. These officials 
 act as the organs of the imperial authority from the 
 centre to the farthest extremities of the empire. Yet 
 they can by delay, by passive resistance, by suggestion, 
 by falsehood, by the arts of etiquette and ceremonial, 
 and all the other methods familiar to the practised 
 servants of autocracy, mislead or thwart the will of their 
 master or render it of no effect. 
 
 Such is the central power. Let us now consider the 
 body of the people. In Russia, industry and city life 
 have not formed a large part of the national existence. 
 
Ji,98 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 The mass of the people still live directly from the soil, 
 and are organised in the mir. As is now well known, 
 the mir is merely the Eussian form of the village com- 
 munity, which at one time prevailed over all the 
 countries of the world, as they attained to the sedentary 
 or agricultural stage of development. It was the natural 
 social form assumed by people settling down into agri- 
 culture. It was the social unit as determined by 
 obvious local economic and historic conditions. In 
 most countries the village community has been reduced 
 to a shadow of its former self, partly through the opera- 
 tion of natural economic causes, but largely also because 
 the central power and the classes connected therewith 
 have crushed it out. The local life of England in par- 
 ticular has been repressed and starved through the want 
 of the most elementary resources and opportunities, and 
 it is now the most pressing duty of statesmen to revive 
 and restore it in accordance with the prevalent con- 
 ditions. 
 
 t Owing to a variety of causes, which we cannot ex- 
 plain here, the Russian mir has continued to survive. 
 It gave to the mass of the Russian people their own 
 form of social life and of self-government ; and it was 
 economically self-sufficing. The mir drew from the 
 soil, which it held in common occupation, the means 
 for its own support and for the support of the nation as 
 a whole. The relations of the members of the mir to 
 each other were substantially conducted on terms of 
 equality and freedom ; but in view of the nobles and 
 the Tzardom they were serfs till their emancipation in 
 •I 86 1. The mir was a social-economic arrangement, 
 
ANARCHISM 199 
 
 convenient both for the noble proprietors and for the 
 Tzardom. It aflfbrded to the central Government the 
 necessary taxes and the necessary recruits ; and therer 
 fore the Tzars did not disturb it, but rather sought to 
 fix and solidify it, and thereby make it more efficient as 
 a source of supply both of soldiers and material means. 
 Thus for centuries, full of movement in the political 
 history of B>ussia, the mir has with little change en- 
 dured as the social and economic basis of the national 
 life. 
 
 In E.ussia, therefore, we find only two institutions 
 that have had a real vitality and a specific influence, 
 the Tzardom and the peasant community. Nobles and 
 priests have exercised a substantive power only when 
 the Tzardom has suffered a temporary lapse. The 
 middle class has always been inconsiderable. 
 
 It was into a nation thus constituted that the most 
 advanced revolutionary opinions of Western Europe at 
 last found their way. The spirit of revolt had indeed 
 not been unknown in Russia in former times. Among 
 a peasantry sunk in immemorial ignorance and misery, 
 and harassed by the incessanb tribute of men and taxes 
 which they were forced to pay, discontent had always 
 been more or less prevalent, and it had sometimes broken 
 out in open rebellion. During the reigns of the great 
 Catharine and of Alexander I. a sentimental LiberaUsm 
 had been fashionable in the upper classes. But it was 
 not a very practical matter, and was not a serious 
 danger to the autocracy. At the beginning of his reign 
 Nicholas had to face arising among the Guards at 
 St. Petersburg, led by Liberal officers of high birth. He 
 
2bo A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 suppressed it in the speediest and most summary 
 manner. Till his death, in 1855, Nicholas maintained 
 a regime of repression at home, and was the champion 
 of absolutism in Europe. 
 
 Many circumstances combined to render the accession 
 of Alexander II. a new departure in Eussian history. 
 The old methods of government had been thoroughly 
 discredited by the failures of the Crimean war. There 
 was a general feeling that the ideas and methods of the 
 West, which had proved their superiority during the 
 struggle, must be tried in Russia. As the young 
 Emperor recognised the necessity of a new policy, 
 great changes were made, and all went well for a time. 
 Alexander carried the emancipation of the serfs, 
 instituted new courts of law and a new system of local 
 government, and gave a real impetus to education. It 
 was not long, however, before the Emperor began to 
 hesitate in view of the Liberal forces which he had let 
 loose, and which threatened to overturn the whole fabric 
 of Russian society. Like his uncle, Alexander I., the 
 young monarch had not resolution enough to persevere 
 in a practical and systematic course of reform. 
 
 The changes already made and the prospect of changes 
 still to come, roused into action all the conservative in- 
 stincts and prejudices of old Russia. The insurrection of 
 Poland in 1863, which called forth the sympathies of 
 many Russian Liberals, provoked also a powerful reaction 
 in old Eussian circles. An attempt by KarakozofE on 
 the Emperor's life in 1866 may be regarded as the 
 turning-point of his reign. Ideas of steady reform and 
 of gradiial temperate change have not yet become 
 
ANARCHISM 20-1 
 
 familiar to the Russian temperament. Between those 
 who wished to reform everything, and those who wished 
 no change at all or to change very slowly, no compromise 
 was possible in the circumstances and conditione of 
 Russian society. Thus a revolutionary movement soon 
 declared itself in full opposition to the policy of the 
 Tzar. When we consider that the new party menaced 
 not only the special political institutions of Russia, but 
 the fundamental principles of the existing society gene- 
 rally — ^property, religion, and the family — we can see 
 jbhat the breach was inevitable.* 
 
 Three stages may be recognised in the history of the 
 revolutionary movement. The first covered the period 
 from the accession of Alexander II. in 1855 to about 
 1870. Its leading characteristic was negation, and the 
 name of Nihilism, which is often erroneously applied to 
 the whole revolutionary movement, should properly be 
 restricted to this early stage. In the main it was simply 
 the spirit of the Hegelian left frankly accepting the 
 materialism of Buchner and Moleschdlt as the final 
 dehverance of philosophy. In a country where rehgion 
 had little influence among th6 educated classes, and 
 where philosophy was not a slow and gradual growth of 
 the native mind, but a fashion imported from abroad, 
 the most destructive materialism made an easy conquest. 
 It was the newest fashion ; it was the prevalent form 
 among those who were reckoned the most advanced 
 
 * The fullest account of the revolutionary movement in Russia is 
 Alphons Thun's Oeschiehte der revohitiondren Beicegungen in Buss- 
 land. See also Stepniak's Underground Russia, and Russia vmder 
 the Tzars. 
 
202 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 thinkers; it was clear, simple and thorough. It was 
 particularly well suited to a state of culture which was 
 superficial, without experience or discipline. 
 
 In the words of Turgenief, who has portrayed the 
 movement in his novel, Fathers and Sons, the Nihilists 
 were men who " bowed before no authority of any kind, 
 and accepted on faith no principle, whatever veneration 
 may surround it.'' They weighed political institutions 
 and social forms, religion and the family, in the balances 
 of that negative criticism, which was their prevailing 
 characteristic, and they found them all wanting. 
 With revolutiooiary impatience they rejected everything 
 that had come down from the past, good and bad alike. 
 They had no respect for art or poetry, sentiment or 
 romance. A new fact added to our positive knowledge 
 by the dissecting of a frog was more important than 
 the poetry of Goethe or a painting by Raphael. 
 
 Nihilism as represented by Bazarof, in the novel of 
 Turgenief, is certainly not an attractive picture. We 
 may respect his courage, honesty, thoroughness and 
 independence ; but his roughness, cynicism and in- 
 difierence to family feelings are very repellent. Through 
 the early death of the hero we are prevented from ob- 
 serving what might have been the further development 
 .of his character. We feel sure that if the story of this 
 typical life had been continued, we should have seen 
 very considerable changes in' a more positive direction. 
 The mood of universal negation can only be a temporary 
 phase in individual or national development. Negation 
 may be the physic, it cannot be the diet, of the mind. 
 
 No movement for emancipation can be a purely nega- 
 
ANARCHISM 203 
 
 tive thing ; and no movement can be adequately described 
 by reference to a single characteristic. The Nihilists 
 found a wider view of the world in the writings of 
 Darwin, Herbert Spencer and J. 8. Mill ; and they had 
 also at an early period felt the influence of Saint Simon, 
 Fourier, Robert Owen, and latterly also of Lassalle and 
 Marx. From the first, Nihilism seems to have involved 
 a broad and real sympathy with the suffering classes. 
 They wished to recall the attention of men from windy 
 verbiage about art and poetry, from a sentimentalism 
 which was often spurious, and from the clatter of the 
 parliamentary machine, whose grinding was solely for 
 the benefit of the wealthier classes, to the question of 
 ' daily bread for all,' to the common people perishing 
 for lack of elementary knowledge. And they insisted 
 strongly on the equal rights of women. It is evident 
 that Nihilism could only be a passing phase in the his- 
 tory of Russia, and that it had a wholesome and bene- 
 ficial side as well as a repellent one. In a country 
 which was oppressed by an enormous burden of im- 
 memorial prejudices and abuses, a powerful dose of 
 negation was calculated to have a most salutary opera- 
 tion. But the movement could not long live on nega- 
 tions merely. As time went on, the struggle for eman- 
 cipation in Russia began to assume a more positive 
 character. 
 
 In this way the revolutionary movement entered on 
 its second stage, the stage of socialistic teaching and 
 propaganda. Events in the West had kindled the 
 imagination of the youthful champions of liberty in 
 Russia, the rise and progress of the International, the 
 
204 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 terrible struggle at Paris under the Oommuhe, the 
 growth of the German social-democracy. A positive 
 and far-reaching ideal now drew the aspirations of the 
 enthusiasts for liberty, the deliverance of the proletariat, 
 represented in Russia by an ignorant and wretched 
 peasantry. The anarchic socialism of Bakunin was 
 unquestionably the controlling element in the new 
 .Russian movement. Beside it we must place the 
 influence of Lavroff, another eminent Russian exile, 
 who represented the more temperate phase of anarch- 
 ism, shading off into the recognition of a constitutional 
 and gradual development of the theory. In its 
 second stage also the revolutionary movement of 
 Russia was a mixed phenomenon. The anarchism of 
 Bakunin continued, however, to be the characteristic 
 feature, and thus the negative factor was still pro- 
 minent enough. 
 
 Prom Bakunin also proceeded the practical watch- 
 word at this stage of the revolutionary movement, ' to 
 go among the people' and spread the new doctrines. 
 And this course was unwittingly furthered by the 
 action of the Government. Early in the seventies, 
 hundreds of young Russians of both sexes were study- 
 ing in Western Europe, particularly at Zurich in 
 Switzerland. As their stay there exposed them to 
 constant contact with revolutionary Russian exiles, and 
 to infection with all the unsettling ideas of the West, 
 an imperial ukase of 1873 recalled them home. They 
 returned home, but they carried the new ideas with 
 them. 'Going among the people' was adopted as a 
 systematic principle, a passion and a fashion among the 
 
ANARCHISM 205 
 
 youthful adherents of anarchism. In accordance with 
 their creed they had no appointed organisation, no very 
 definite plan of action. They ' went among the people ' 
 as the apostles of a new. theory, each one as his heart 
 moved him. 
 
 They went to be teachers or midwives or medical 
 helps in the villages. In order the better to 
 identify themselves with the common folks, some 
 learned the humblest occupations. The trades of 
 carpenter or shoemaker were most usually chosen, as 
 being the easiest to master. Others toiled for fifteen 
 hours a day in the factories, that they might, have an 
 opportunity of saying a word in season to their fellow- 
 workers. Ladies and gentlemen, connected with the 
 aristocracy and nurtured in all the refinement of 
 civilisation, patiently endured the nameless trials of 
 living with the Eussian peasant. They endeavoured to 
 adopt the rough hands and swarthy weather-beaten 
 complexion, as well as the dress of the peasant, that 
 they might not excite his distrust, for the gulf between 
 the lower classes and the gentlemen in Eussia is wide 
 and fixed. The peasants had experience of the gentleman 
 only as the representative of the Government coming 
 with the knout and the police to extort taxes and 
 recruits. No wonder that the sight of a shirt under- 
 neath the sheepskin of the socialist missionary was 
 enough to arouse the unconquerable suspicion of the 
 poor people of the country. 
 
 The success of the missionaries was limited. With 
 all his strong suspicion and his narrow range of ideas, 
 the peasant could not easily understand the meaning 
 
2o6 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 and purpose of those strange men teaching strange 
 things. The traditions of the past, as they came down 
 to him dim and confused, contained many a bitter 
 memory of disappointed hopes. He was apathetic as 
 well as suspicious. Moreover, the teacher often 
 delivered his message in half-digested formulas which 
 had a meaning only as connected with the economic 
 development of Western Europe, and which did not 
 rightly attach themselves to anything within the 
 experience of the Russian peasantry. Above all, the 
 propaganda enjoyed only a very brief period of activity. 
 The teachers went about their work with very little 
 circumspection, in the careless free-and-easy way which 
 seems so natural to the Russian temperament. Con- 
 sequently, the Government had no difficulty in discover- 
 ing arid following up the traces of the propagandists. 
 Before the year 1876 had ended,' nearly all of therii 
 were in prison. More than 2000 were arrested during 
 the period of 1 873-76 ! Many were detained in prison 
 for years, till the investigations of the police resulted 
 in 50 being brought to trial at Moscow and 193 at 
 St. Petersburg at the end of 1 877. Most were acquitted 
 by the courts, yet the Government sent them into exile 
 by administrative process. 
 
 The adverse experiences which we have recorded 
 brought the attempts at peaceful propaganda to a close, 
 and the revolutionary party decided on the propaganda 
 of action. They resolved tq settle among the people 
 and prepare them for a rising against th« Government. 
 Where peaceful teaching had failed, they sought to 
 force a way by violent methods. It was a desperate 
 
ANARCHISM 207 
 
 policy to pursue among a people who had not been 
 able even to understand the aims of the revolutionary 
 party. 
 
 It is very characteristic of the circumstances of 
 Russia that the most successful attempt at thus organ- 
 ising a scheme for revolutionary action could gain the 
 adhesion of the peasantry only by pretending that it 
 had the sanction of the Tzar; Jacob Stephanovitz, one 
 of the prominent members of the revolutionary party, 
 gave it out in South-Western Russia that he had an 
 order from the Tzar to form a secret society among the 
 common people against the nobles, priests and officials 
 who were opposing the imperial wishes to confer land 
 and freedom on the peasants. Those to whom he 
 addressed himself could hardly believe that the Emperor 
 was so powerless, but he did eventually succeed in 
 forming a society of about a thousand members. When 
 the plot was discovered by the police, the peasants were 
 naturally enraged at the deception which had been 
 practised on them. It should be added that such a 
 method of action has not met with the approval of the 
 party as a whole. 
 
 Like the peaceful propaganda, the propaganda of 
 action failed to gain a firm footing among the people. 
 At every step the revolutionary party found the organs of 
 the central power ready to suppress their efforts in the 
 most summary way. They were now convinced that 
 they must directly attack the autocracy and its 
 servants, and as they had received no mercy they 
 decided to show none; and thus began the resolute, 
 systematic, and merciless struggle of the revolutionary 
 
2o8 A HISTORY, OF SOCIALISM 
 
 party against the Tzardom. For this end they naturally 
 made a great change in their mode of action. They 
 adopted a strong organisation instead of the lax 
 discipline or total want of discipline commended by 
 Bakunin. Affairs were conducted by a secret central 
 committee, who with unsparing energy carried out 
 the new aims of the party. The first great act in this 
 the third stage of the Eussian revolutionary movement, 
 was the assassination of General TrepofE, Prefect of 
 Police, by Vera Sassoulitsch, at St. Petersburg, in 
 1878. The occasion of the deed was the flogging, by 
 command of TrepofE, of a political prisoner personally 
 unknown to her. Her object was to avenge the cause 
 of outraged humanity on the servant of the autocracy. 
 At the trial she was acquitted by the jury, to the great 
 surprise of the Imperial Court. An attempt by the 
 police to apprehend her on leaving the place of trial 
 was frustrated by the mob, and she succeeded in 
 making her escape to Switzerland. 
 
 The public gave the most unmistakable proofs of 
 sympathy with Vera Sassoulitsch; and the event 
 naturally excited great enthusiasm ■ and emulation 
 among the eager spirits of the revolutionary party. 
 Police officials and spies of the Government were cut off 
 without mercy. General Mezentseff, Chief of Police, 
 was stabbed in the streets of the capital in broad day- 
 light. Prince Kropotkin, Governor of Charkoff, a 
 relative of the revolutionist, was shot. General 
 Drenteln was also openly attacked on the streets. 
 After thus assailing the officers of the executive, they 
 proceeded systematically to plan the assassination of 
 
ANARCHISM 209 
 
 the Tzar himself, as the head of the central power 
 which they abhorred so much. Solovieff fired five shots 
 at the Tzar, without doing any harm ; three attempts 
 were made to wreck the imperial train, one of them 
 failing because the Tzar had made a change in his 
 arrangements ; and he escaped the terrible explosion at 
 the Winter Palace only because he was later than 
 usual in entering his dining-room. These failures did 
 not prevent the executive committee from prosecuting 
 its desperate work, and on March 13, 1881, followed the 
 tragic death of Alexander II. 
 
 We need not say that the violent death of Alexander 
 II. sent a thrill of horror throughout Europe. It was 
 felt to be a most lamentable and regrettable ending to 
 a reign which had begun with such high and generous 
 aspirations, and with so much promise of good to the 
 Russian people. There was a natural difficulty in 
 understanding how a Sovereign, benevolent in char- 
 acter and not unwilling, to pursue a liberal policy, 
 should be the victim of a forward movement among his 
 people. The explanation must be found in the special 
 circumstances of Russia, for Alexander was merely the 
 representative of a political system, which, by its 
 historic evolution, its nature and position, has exer- 
 ~ cised an absolute and often merciless mastery over its 
 subjetets, and the men that cut him off were youthful 
 enthusiasts, who with revolutionary impatience were 
 eager to apply to the belated circumstances of Russia 
 the most extreme theories of the West. 
 
 The historian has often to regret that more wisdom is 
 not available for the management of human affairs, and 
 
 14 
 
2IO A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 we may believe that a moderate measure of wisdom and 
 patience might have prevented the fatal collision between 
 the Tzar and the revolutionary party. The Tzardom, as 
 we have seen, has performed a great and indispensable 
 function in the national life of Eussia . It still seems to be 
 the only practicable form of government in such a coun- 
 try. No class is advanced or powerful enough to take its 
 place. The mass of the Eussian people are not yet capable 
 of self-government on a wide scale. There is no large 
 educated class. The middle and industrial class, in the 
 modem sense of the word, are still comparatively small 
 and unimportant ; and it is probable enough that if there 
 had been an influential middle class, and if the abolition 
 of serfdom had been effected under their auspices, the 
 peasants would have received less favourable treatment 
 than they experienced from the autocracy. The best 
 available form of government for Eussia seems to be 
 an enlightened Tzardom, and the Emperor Alexander II, 
 was personally both enlightened and well-intentioned. 
 
 At the same time the position of the Tzardom cannot 
 very long be tenable in its present form. Eussia lies 
 where it is, in close proximity to progressive countries. 
 In the past the Eussian people have been largely 
 disciplined by Germans ; they have learned much from 
 England, and ha.ve perhaps shown the greatest social 
 and spiritual affinity to the French. This intercourse 
 will go on. The strongest and most watchful Tzar 
 cannot maintain a Chinese wall of separation between 
 his country and the rest of Europe. Nor can the Tzars 
 expect to have the benefit of the science of Western 
 Europe for military purposes and at the same time 
 
ANARCHISM 211 
 
 succeed in shutting it out from influencing tlie social 
 and political life of their people. It is inevitable, 
 therefore, that the liberal ideas of the West will continue 
 to dissolve and disintegrate the old fabric of Eussian 
 ideas and institutions. One of two results appears 
 necessary, either that the Tzars must return to the path 
 of reasonable and energetic reform, or they may risk 
 a revolution which will sweep away the present central 
 power. The reactionary measures now prevailing in 
 Russia do seem to tend towards the latter event. If such 
 a consummation were to happen, it does not, however, 
 follow that the cause of freedom would have any great 
 direct and immediate furtherance. In the circumstances 
 of Russia, the man who wields the military power must 
 be supreme. A new ruler resting on the army might be 
 not less an autocrat than the old. We can but say that 
 the present policy of the Tzardom is seriously retarding 
 and arresting the natural development of Russia, and 
 that it tends to provoke a catastrophe which may 
 endanger its own existence. 
 
 It remains now to say a word about the revolutionists 
 who have played so remarkable a part in the recent 
 history of Russia. The members of the Eussian 
 revolutionary party have been drawn from nearly all 
 classes of the people. Some, as we have seen, belonged 
 to highly placed aristocratic families ; some have been 
 sons of priests and of the lower oflBcials. More recently 
 the rural classes have supplied active adherents of the 
 militant party. One of the most notable features of 
 the movement is the influence exerted in it by women. 
 It was Vera Sassoulitsch who opened the death struggle 
 
212 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 with the autocracy in 1878.. A lady of high birth, 
 Sophia Perovskaia, .by the waving of a veil guided the 
 men who threw the fatal bombs at the assassination of 
 Alexander II. 
 
 But whether aristocrats or peasants, men or 
 women, the members of the Russian revolutionary 
 party have been remarkable for their youth. The 
 large majority of those engaged in the struggle had 
 not attained to the age of twenty -five. In view of their 
 extreme youth, therefore, we need not say that they had 
 more enthusiasm than wisdom, and more of the energy 
 that aims at immediate success than of the considerate 
 patience that knows how to wait for the slowly maturing 
 fruits of the best and surest progress. Having regard 
 to the very subversive theories which they tried to sow 
 broadcast among the masses of the Russian people, we 
 see clearly enough that no autocracy in the world could 
 avoid taking up the challenge to authority which they 
 so rudely threw down. Only the government of an 
 enlightened people long familiar with the free and open 
 discussion of every variety of opinion, can afford to 
 give unlimited opportunity of propaganda to such 
 views as were entertained by the Russian revolutionary 
 party. 
 
 Yet while the theories of the party were from the 
 first of a most subversive nature, it is right to 
 emphasise the fact that they did not proceed to violent 
 action till they were goaded into it by the police and 
 the other officials of the central Government. Indeed, 
 the measures of the Government and its representatives 
 have often directly tended to the stirring up of the 
 
ANARCHISM 213 
 
 revolutionary mood. By their ■ irritating measures of 
 repression they provoked, among the students at the 
 universities, disturbances which they quelled by most 
 brutal methods. Young men arrested on suspicion, 
 and kept in vile prisons for years while awaiting 
 investigation, were naturally driven to hostile reflection 
 on the iniquity of a Government from which they 
 received such treatment. 
 
 In speaking of a country like Eussia, we need not 
 say that the most elementary political rights were 
 denied the revolutionists. They had no right of public 
 meeting, no freedom of the press, no freedom of 
 utterance anywhere. They were surrounded with spies 
 ready to give to every word and deed the worst inter- 
 pretation. The peasants whom they desired to instruct 
 in the new teaching might inform upon them. Their 
 comrades in propaganda might be induced or coerced to 
 betray them. It was often fatal even to be suspected, as 
 the police and the other organs of Government were only 
 too disposed to take the most rigorous measures against 
 all who were charged with revolutionary opinion. Nor 
 could the accused appeal to the law with any confidence, 
 for the ordinary tribunals might be set aside, and his 
 fate be decided by administrative procedure; that is, 
 he could be executed, or condemned to prison or exile 
 in Siberia, without the pretence of a legal trial. In such 
 circumstances it was natural that resolute champions of 
 liberty should be driven to secret conspiracy in its 
 extremest form, and to violent action of the most 
 merciless character. 
 
 While therefore historical accuracy obliges us to 
 
214 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 emphasise the fact that the aims of the revolutionary 
 party far exceeded all that is included in liberalism and 
 constitutional government, it is only just to explain that 
 they resorted to violent methods only because the most 
 elementary political rights were denied them. In the 
 fiercest mood of their terrible struggle with the auto- 
 cracy, they were still ready to throw aside their 
 weapons. 
 
 In the address sent by the Executive Committee to 
 Alexander III., after the death of his father, in March 
 1 88 1, they offered to give up their violent mode of 
 action, and submit unconditionally to a National 
 Assembly freely elected by the people. They meant 
 under a constitutional government to have recourse 
 only to constitutional methods. 
 
 With regard to the number of those concerned in the 
 Russian revolutionary movement, it is not easy to speak 
 with precision. There is no proof that the anarchist 
 opinions have gained a large body of adherents in the 
 country. The numerical strength of the party directly 
 engaged in the struggle with the Tzardom has always 
 been comparatively small. On the other hand, the 
 movement has evidently met with a very wide sym- 
 pathy in Russian society. In the absence of precise 
 information, we may quote the words of one who has a 
 good right to speak for the revolutionary party : 
 
 ' The Russian revolutionary movement is really a revo- 
 lution sui generis, carried on, however, not by the mass 
 of the people or those feeling the need of it, but by a kind 
 of delegation, acting on behalf of the mass of the people 
 with this purpose. 
 
ANARCHISM 215 
 
 'No one has ever undertaken, and perhaps no one 
 could with any certainty undertake, to calculate the 
 numerical strength of this party — that is to say, of those 
 who share the convictions and aspirations of the 
 revolutionists. All that can be said is, that it is a 
 very large party, and that at the present moment it 
 numbers hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions 
 of men, disseminated everywhere. This mass of people, 
 which might be called the Eevolutionary Nation, does 
 not, however, take a direct part in the struggle. It 
 entrusts its interests and its honour, its hatred and its 
 vengeance, to those who make the revolution their sole 
 and exclusive occupation ; for under the conditions 
 existing in Russia, people cannot remain as ordinary 
 citizens and devote themselves at the same time to 
 Socialism and the Revolution. 
 
 ' The real revolutionary party, or rather the militant 
 organisation, is recruited from this class of revolutionary 
 leaders.' * 
 
 * Stepniak, Underground Russia, p. 264. 
 
OHAPTEE X 
 
 THE PURIFIED SOCIALISM 
 
 We have, in the preceding chapters, sketched the rise 
 and the principles of the leading schools of historic 
 socialism. The history we have reviewed is a most 
 protean one, and very prolific in theories which are more 
 or less akin. 
 
 It is easy to trace certain general features of resem- 
 blance in the development of socialism. In the 
 experiments conducted by the followers of Saint-Simon, 
 Fourier, and Owen, we see a desire forthwith to create 
 a ready-made and complete socialism, which almost 
 always ended in failure. Louis Blanc and Lassalle 
 agreed in demanding the organisation of society on 
 democratic principles, and the establishment of produc- 
 tive associations by a State thus constituted. The 
 resemblance in type between the community of Owen, 
 the phalarbge of Fourier, and the free commune of 
 Bakunin is obvious ; and it is not going too far to 
 say that all of them have interesting points of analogy 
 with the village community, which has its survival in 
 the Russian mir. 
 
 Throughout the history of socialism we naturally also 
 observe the contrast between the tendency which more 
 
THE PURIFIED SOCIALISM 217 
 
 or less emphasises State authority and the need of 
 centralisation, and that other tendency which regards 
 the local body as cardinal and decisive. As we have 
 seen, that contrast was perfectly clear in the earliest 
 French socialism, in the schools of Saint-Simon and 
 Fourier. While calling on the State to furnish credit 
 for productive associations, both L. Blanc and Lassalle 
 strongly insisted that these associations should be 
 self-governing and self-developing. The centralising 
 tendency was very marked in Eodbertus. Though it 
 cannot be maintained that the Marx school insist ex- 
 cessively on the claims of authority, yet in the conduct 
 of the International they had a severe struggle with 
 the anarchist following of Bakunin. It is simply the 
 old question of authority and order in relation to indi- 
 vidual and local freedom, which always re-appears under 
 the newest conditions, and which cannot be solved on 
 absolute principles. 
 
 Notwithstanding those general features of resem- 
 blance, it would be a serious mistake to identify social- 
 ism with any of its forms, past or present. They are 
 only passing phases in a movement which will endure. 
 If socialism has given proof of a persistent vitality, it 
 has also undergone many transformations, and will in all 
 probability undergo many more. Our task now is to 
 inquire into the significance, tendency, and value of 
 the general movement. 
 
 The problem before us is one of historical interpre- 
 tation in the widest sense of the word. It is not an 
 academic question which can be settled by the scholarly 
 comparison of texts and systems. 
 
2i8 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 If the socialistic movement were complete and 
 finished, it would be merely a subject of sympathetic 
 analysis and generalisation by the historian. But the 
 socialistic movement is not complete ; it is in process 
 of making — probably only in its early stage. It is a ques- 
 tion, therefore, which must be treated not only in the 
 light of history and human nature, but with special 
 reference to the now prevailing forces — industrial, 
 political, social, and ethical. For on these will depend 
 the future course of the movement and its prospects of 
 success. While socialism has a past, it has also a pro- 
 found significance for the present and the future. The 
 great task for the student is to find out the rational 
 meaning and purport of socialism, its probable sig- 
 nificance for the present time and the time coming. 
 
 For the rational interpretation of socialism we can- 
 not too often emphasise the fact that it is not an 
 abstract system, but a thing in movement. It is not 
 wedded to any stereotyped set of formulas, whether of 
 Marx or any other, but must be rooted in reality, and, 
 while moulding facts, it must adapt , itself to them. 
 Above all, we must ever remember that it claims to 
 represent the aspirations after a better life of the 
 toiling and suffering millions of the human race. 
 
 Even a cursory review of the historic socialism is 
 enough to show that, while it has been prolific of new 
 thought in economics, it has been disfigured by every 
 kind of extravagance. In general, it has been far too 
 artificial, arbitrary, and absolute in its treatment of 
 social questions. As we have seen, the early theorists 
 especially were profoundly ignorant of the laws govern- 
 
THE PURIFIED SOCIALISM 219 
 
 ing the evolution of society. Many later socialists of 
 great influence have laid excessive stress on revolution 
 as the lever of social progress. Pew of them have 
 really appreciated the bearings of the population ques- 
 tion on the great problems of society. Most of them 
 have been far too absolute in their condemnation of 
 competition. In fact, their general position consists 
 far too much in a sweeping condemnation of the present 
 society, forgetful the while that it is only out of the 
 present that the future, in which they place their hopes, 
 can proceed. 
 
 The current socialism, too, Jias very prematurely 
 shown a tendency to degenerate into a stiff and barren 
 orthodoxy, which seeks to apply narrow and half- 
 digested theories, without adapting or even reasonably 
 understanding them, to circumstances for which they 
 are not suited. This is particularly apparent in the 
 attempts to introduce into England and America for- 
 mulas and modes of action which have grown up in the 
 very different atmosphere of the European Continent. 
 It has not sufficiently recognised the fluent a-nd 
 many-sided variety of modern life, which cannot be 
 embodied in any formula, however comprehensive and 
 elastic. 
 
 Finally, socialistic speculation has in many cases 
 tended, not to reform and humanise, but to subvert the 
 family, on the soundness of which social health above 
 all things depends. It has not understood the solidity 
 and value of the hereditary principle in the develop- 
 ment of society. Socialists have, in short, been far too 
 ready to attack great institutions, which it must be the 
 
220 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 aim of all rational progress, not to subvert, but to re- 
 form and purify. 
 
 In the socialistic treatment of other questions, such as 
 capitfil, rent and interest, the same defects of arbitrari- 
 ness and absoluteness are apparent. But the extrava- 
 gances of the historic socialism are so obvious that 
 they confute themselves, and we shall not dwell on this 
 aspect of our subject. We must remember that most 
 historic systems have had to run themselves clear of the 
 turbid elements with which they were originally mixed. 
 Socialism, considered both as a movement and as a 
 system of economic thought, is still in process of de- 
 velopment. Its theories must undergo the rough- 
 hewing of continual controversy, discussion, and criticism . 
 The whole movement must pass through the test, the 
 tear and wear of experience, under the conditions pre- 
 scribed by history and the fundamental laws of human 
 nature, before its ideals can hope to be wedded to fact. 
 We might add that it will receive the purification of 
 experience ; only, we have to lament that it is the fate 
 of our ideals to submit also to the degradation of ex- 
 perience. 
 
 A like charge of abstractness may justly be brought 
 against the two great German economists, Adolf 
 Wagner and Schafile, whose writings have so largely 
 promoted a better comprehension of socialism. Their 
 economic works are monuments of learning and lucidity, 
 but their exposition and interpretation of the subject is 
 marked by that excessive love of system which is 
 usually characteristic of German specialists. They 
 have brought to the discussion of the historic socialism 
 
THE PURIFIED SOCIALISM 221 
 
 the same systematising spirit with which German 
 economists have treated Adam Smith. The economists 
 of the Fatherland have reduced the teaching of Adam 
 Smith to a set of abstract propositions, and so have 
 transformed it beyond recognition. In like manner 
 Adolf Wagner laboriously sums up socialism in abstract 
 language, whereas it is above all things a concrete 
 movement, instinct with change and with human pas- 
 sions. In his Bom wnd Leben des sozialen Korpers 
 SchafiBle's construction of socialism is an elaborate 
 attempt to conceive society as transformed and domi- 
 nated by a single principle. 
 
 Such a point of view can never accord with the 
 actual development of historic forces. In the past the 
 great economic eras have been remarkable for the endless 
 variety of forms which they have assumed. Feudalism 
 was not a stereotyped system, but took a special form 
 in each European country, and in each country it 
 changed from age to age. The competitive system has 
 never entirely and exclusively dominated any Bociety, 
 and has been endlessly modified by custom and the tradi- 
 tions of the past, by national and social interests, and by 
 moral considerations. Adam Smith, the great expounder 
 of natural liberty, did not put it forth as an abstract 
 and exclusive principle, but set it in the light of historic 
 fact, and reserved a large sphere where private enter- 
 prise needed to be supplemented by the action of the 
 State. We can only say of the competitive system that 
 it has been normal or prevalent over the most advanced 
 countries of the world for a considerable time. We 
 must conceive socialism in the same way as claiming, 
 
222 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 when certain historical conditions have been realised 
 to be the normal or prevalent type of economic and 
 social organisation. 
 
 In fact, they have had too exclusively in view the 
 theories of Marx and Rodbertns. In his conception of 
 socialism Wagner has been chiefly influenced by Rod- 
 bertns. Schafile, in his Quintessenz des Socialismus, 
 appears as the interpreter of the Marx socialism. Even 
 the less absolute presentation of the socialistic theories 
 by Lassalle should have been sufficient to bring out the 
 contrast between socialism in movement and socialism 
 in the abstract. 
 
 This is very nearly equivalent to saying that both 
 economists have been too much influenced by the Prus 
 sian type of government and theory of the State. With 
 regard to the two socialists, Rodbertus and Marx, we 
 are not surprised that the former should be Prussian 
 throughout in his way of thinking, but it is a notable 
 instance of the irony of circumstances that Marx should 
 be so largely controlled by habits of speculation which 
 he had learned in Germany in his youth. He was to 
 a great degree Prussian and Hegelian in his political 
 and philosophical habit of mind till the end of his life. 
 It is natural enough that the conception of socialism 
 formed by Wagner and Schafile should be of a sinjilar 
 character. For them socialism is a system of centrali- 
 sation, of management from above (von ohen herah) 
 under a bureaucracy. Such a view may suit people 
 that are used to a centralising autocracy and bureau- 
 cracy associated with militarism, but it is entirely 
 opposed to English ideas. An industrial and economic 
 
THE PURIFIED SOCIALISM 223 
 
 system, whicli would remind us at every step of the 
 Prussian army, the Prussian police and Prussian oflScial- 
 ism, is not attractive to those who have breathed a freer 
 air. 
 
 Prussia has had a great mission to perform in modern 
 history. From its geographical position and the cir- 
 cumstances attendant on its rise and progress, we can 
 see that it required a powerful army, a strongly cen- 
 tralised government, and an industrial system entirely 
 different from laissez-faire. We must respect the great 
 vocations of the different historic peoples, among 
 which Prussia has been one of the first. But that is no 
 reason for expressing socialism in terms suggested by 
 the Prussian form of government, or for supposing that 
 the claim of socialism to control the economic organisa- 
 tion of the future will depend ori its conforming to the 
 Prussian type of state. It is to be devoutly hoped that 
 the type of government rendered necessary by the 
 struggle for existence among the nations on the Euro- 
 pean continent will not become universal. 
 
 But we must now consider a question which is 
 vastly more important than any of the criticisms now 
 offered. What may be regarded as the solid and 
 permanent contribution to human progress made by 
 socialism ? 
 
 There should be no doubt that socialism has largely 
 contributed to the following results : — 
 
 First, It has greatly helped to give prevalence to 
 the historical conception of Political Economy. The 
 very conception of socialism has been based on the idea 
 
224 A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 of social-economic change. Their subject has naturally 
 'led socialists to study the rise, growth, decline, and fall of 
 economic institutions. And, as we shall see later on, 
 the influence of Hegel and Darwin has taught them to 
 merge the idea of historical economics in the wider and 
 more fundamental conception of evolution. In England, 
 socialists are now the chief promoters of the advance in 
 economic study from the ordinary standpoint to the 
 historical, and from the historical to the evolutionary 
 point of view. 
 
 Secondly, Socialism has greatly deepened and widened 
 the ethical conception of Political Economy. It has, 
 in season and out of season, taught that the entire 
 technical and economic mechanism of society should be 
 made subordinate to human well-being, and that moral 
 principle should be supreme over the whole field of 
 industrial and commercial activity. The charge some- 
 times brought against socialism, that it appeals only to 
 the lower appetites and instincts of humanity, is most 
 unjust. It would be a more reasonable criticism to say 
 that it inculcates an unselfishness unattainable by any 
 probable development of human nature. 
 
 Thirdly, Socialism has brought the cause of the 
 poor most powerfully before the civilised world. It is 
 one of the enduring results of socialistic agitation a,nd 
 discussion that the interests of the suffering members 
 of the human race, so long ignored and so fearfully ne- 
 glected, have become a question of the first magnitude, 
 the foremost question in all progressive countries. It 
 is this question which gives a substantial basis and a 
 real meaning to the great democratic movement, which 
 
THE PURIFIED SOCIALISM 225 
 
 it would be the gravest of all errors to regard as a 
 merely political struggle. The cause of the poor is 
 likely to be the burning question for generations, lend- 
 ing to political questions their interest, seriousness, and 
 unspeakable importance. 
 
 Fourthly, Socialism has given us a searching criti- 
 cism of the existing social-economic system. It may be 
 said to have laid its diagnosing finger on all the sores 
 of society. The only objection that can be rationally 
 taken is that the diagnosis has been an exaggerated 
 one. All fair-minded judges will, however, admit that 
 the socialistic criticism of the existing competitive 
 system is largely, if not substantially, justified on the 
 following points : — 
 
 1 . The position of the working people, who are the 
 overwhelming majority in every society, is not in har- 
 mony with ethical ideas. It has often and largely 
 been a position of degradation, demoralisation, and 
 misery. Normally, it is not consistent with what must 
 be striven after as a desirable condition for the mass of 
 humanity, for it is insecure, dependent, and to a large 
 degree servile. The workmen have no reasonable con- 
 trol of their dearest interests ; have no guarantee of a 
 settled home, of daily bread, and of provision for old 
 age. It is a delusive freedom, that has no solid econo- 
 mic basis. 
 
 2. The prevailing competitive system is to a large 
 degree anarchy, and this is not an accident, but a neces- 
 sity of its nature. This anarchy has two great and 
 baneful modes of expression : strikes, which are a form 
 of industrial war, carrying misery and insecurity over 
 
 IS 
 
226 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 large sections of population, and sometimes menacing 
 the industrial and social life of a whole nation ; and the 
 great crises, which at times have even a more disastrous 
 influence, spreading like a storm over the entire civilised 
 world, overthrowing honourable houses of business, 
 and exposing to hopeless ruin and starvation millions 
 of honest people who are in no wise responsible for 
 their fate. And the times of crash are succeeded 
 by protracted periods of stagnation, which for all 
 concerned are scarcely better than the crises which 
 caused it. 
 
 3. The phenomena of waste, which are always more 
 or less a feature of the competitive system, are par- 
 ticularly manifest during the great industrial and 
 commercial crises. Not only are the products of 
 industry intended for consumption wasted in vast 
 masses, but the productive forces themselves, such as 
 machinery and shipping, are sacrificed enormously, 
 whilst great numbers of people are idle and starving. 
 
 4. The prevailing system also leads to the large 
 development of an idle class of the most motley 
 description. Those conversant with the history of 
 revolutions know how influential an overgrown idle 
 class has often been in forcing them on. 
 
 5. The existing competitive system also necessarily 
 leads to a vast amount of inferior, inartistic produc- 
 tion in all departments. Cheapness is too conspicuous 
 a feature of every branch of industry. 
 
 6. Our moral standards in every department of the 
 national life have been lowered and corrupted by the 
 excessive prevalence of a commercial and mercenary 
 
THE PURIFIED SOCIALISM 227 
 
 spirit. No rank, profession, or calling has escaped its 
 influence. 
 
 7. Thus we are led to the general result, that in- 
 equalities of condition, and the too prevalent anarchy 
 and insecurity, as well as the unworthy status of the 
 workers under the competitive system, are a permanent 
 source of trouble and even danger to society. The 
 circumstances of the workmen have improved ; but it 
 is doubtful whether the improvement has kept pace with 
 their advancing enlightenment and the growing sense of 
 their rights and needs. Here again we must empha- 
 sise the fact that the progress of democracy is not 
 merely a political matter. It means still more the 
 continual development of intelligence and of higher 
 and finer needs in the mass of the people, a fuller 
 consciousness of the claims of labour, a greater capa- 
 city for organisation, a wider moral and intellectual 
 horizon. In the contrast between their moral and 
 intellectual growth on the one hand, and their insecure 
 and inferior position as precarious wage-labourers oh 
 the other, we may at one and the same time discover a 
 great danger to oiir present social order and a splendid 
 guarantee of further progress. Now as ever, progress 
 must be attained through struggle, and perfection 
 through suffering. 
 
 Scarcely any reasonable man therefore will deny that 
 socialism has done excellent service to mankind in so 
 strongly emphasising the necessity for further pro- 
 gress. While it has largely helped to rouse the 
 working classes out of their apathy, it has also done 
 much to dispel the comfortable optimism of those 
 
228 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 who had succeeded in the competitive struggle for 
 existence. 
 
 This criticism of society is valuable, but its effect is 
 mainly negative. We may go on to claim, however, 
 that socialism, when purified from materialism, from the 
 too revolutionary, absolute and abstract elements, with 
 which it has been associated in history, can render a 
 positive and substantial service to human improvement 
 that would be vastly more valuable than any criticism. 
 It may be maintained that in its main aim and ten- 
 dency [socialism is perfectly sound and right. For 
 amidst much error and exaggeration it has brought out 
 the type of social economic organisation which in the 
 future should and will prevail. 
 
 In previous chapters it has been made abundantly 
 clear that the characteristic feature of the present 
 economic order lies in the fact that industry is carried 
 on by private competing capitalists served by wage- 
 labour. According to socialism the industry of the 
 future should be carried on by free associated workers 
 rationally utilising a united capital with a view to an 
 equitable system of distribution. As we have already 
 had occasion to say, no formal statement can rightly 
 give expression to the meaning of a great historical 
 movement. But in such language we believe the con- 
 trast between the old order and the new can be most 
 simply and at the same time with due adequacy ex- 
 pressed. 
 
 The same type of industrial organisation has been 
 well set forth by J. S. Mill in these words : "The form 
 
THE PURIFIED SOCIALISM 229 
 
 of association, however, which, if mankind continue to 
 improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, 
 is not tha,t which can exist between a capitalist as chief 
 and workpeople without a voice in the management, 
 but the association of the labourers themselves on terms 
 of equality, collectively owning the capital with which 
 they carry on their operations, and working under 
 managers elected and removable by themselves." * Mill's 
 view of the subject, it may be remarked in passing, was 
 derived from the study of French and English socialists. 
 His good sense saved him from the Utopian extrava- 
 gance of these writers, and as he had little sympathy 
 with the peculiarly German ways of thought, he shows 
 no tendency to the abstractness of the specialists of the 
 Fatherland. The result is a conception of socialism 
 which is at once intrinsically more reasonable, more 
 adapted to the English mind and to universality, than 
 any other offered by prominent economists. And in 
 this connection we need hardly add that by the English 
 mind we mean the miad of the English-speaking 
 people ; also, notwithstanding all that may be said to 
 the contrary, that the English type of society has the 
 best claim to universality, because it has best succeeded 
 in reconciling and realising the fundamental require- 
 ments of order and freedom. 
 
 The simple expression of the socialistic theory will 
 no doubt, in the course of propaganda and discussion, 
 long continue to be overlaid and obscured by a mass of 
 detail, sometimes utopian, sometimes all too abstract 
 and systematic. It will be well, therefore, to keep the 
 * Mill's Political Economy, People's Edition, p. 465. 
 
230 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 simplicity of the type in view, but a few explanations 
 may be necessary more fully to elucidate it. 
 
 The true meaning of socialism, when rationally under- 
 stood, is given in the dominating tendencies of social 
 evolution. On the one hand, the effect of the indus- 
 trial revolution has been to concentrate the means both 
 of production and distribution in immense masses. 
 Capital can now be moved and controlled only on a 
 large scale. The day for the small capital, and the 
 successful control of it by individuals, has passed away. 
 It may continue under exceptional circumstances, but it 
 can no longer expect to be the normal or prevalent form 
 of industry. On the other hand, the body of the people, 
 represented by the modern democracy, can legitimately 
 claim that they shall no longer be excluded from the 
 control of their own economic and social interests. It 
 is a rational and equitable demand that the prevalent 
 divorce of the workers from land and capital should 
 cease. This divorce can be terminated, and the mass 
 of the people can be restored to a participation in the 
 ownership and control of land and capital, only through 
 the principle of association. This is the basis of social- 
 ism as given in the normal and dominant forces of the 
 social evolution of our time. As we said in the intro- 
 duction, socialism is the child of two great revolutions 
 — the industrial revolution, and the vast social and 
 political change embodied in the modern democracy. 
 
 Socialism, rationally interpreted, is therefore simply 
 a movement for uniting labour and capital through the 
 principle of association. It seeks to combine labour 
 and capital in the same industrial and social groups. 
 
THE PURIFIED SOCIALISM 231 
 
 In auch a group the present distinction between 
 labourers and capitalists would cease, and tlie workers 
 become producers, equitably disposing of the entire 
 produce. 
 
 Such an industrial group would be self-governing. 
 Socialism is an attempt to establish a free self-govern- 
 ing type of industry, and would therefore seek to realise 
 in the social economic sphere the principles already 
 recognised in the political. It is a free self-governing 
 form of industry, corresponding in the economic sphere 
 to the democratic system in politics ; industry of the 
 people, by the people, for the people. But while^ a 
 rational socialism seeks to establish industrial freedom, 
 it aims also at promoting and securing industrial peace 
 by terminating the struggle between labour and capital, 
 for, as we have seen, its aim is to unite them in the same 
 group. 
 
 Under such a system the workers will have full 
 control of their economic interests. They will have the 
 sobering and steadying discipline of responsibility. 
 They will no doubt make mistakes, as all bodies of 
 men have done since the beginning of the world ; but as 
 they will suffer by them, so they will have the power 
 of correcting them. It will be a self -reforming and 
 self-developing system of industry. 
 
 In the history and condition of the working people 
 it is a pathetic fact that their sons, who have been 
 gifted with exceptional capacity, generally go over to 
 the richer classes. Their services are thus lost to the 
 class from which they sprang. It must be the aim of 
 the socialist movement also to terminate this incessant 
 
232 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 divorce between labour and intelligence, by providing 
 within the groups of associated workers due scope for 
 the best talent. 
 
 Socialism claims to be the normal and prevalent 
 type of organisation in the future. The methods of 
 production, distribution, and exchange will be under 
 social control. This being so, it may surely be re- 
 garded as a special instance of the arbitrariness and 
 absoluteness of the current socialism, when it main- 
 tains that all capital must pass out of individual owner- 
 ship. It may safely be maintained that such a condition 
 of things is not possible, and that, if it were possible, it 
 is entirely undesirable, because most likely to repress 
 individual freedom, and affording indejfinite scope for 
 social tyranny. Under any conceivable system of 
 society the free development of man is likely to be 
 promoted by the possession of reasonable private means. 
 The only objection that can be rationally alleged 
 against private property is when it involves injustice to 
 others — a possibility which, under socialism, is amply 
 provided against by the prevalence of social control 
 over economic processes. 
 
 The views just stated are not unwarranted by the 
 historic socialism. Amidst much that is most ex- 
 travagant, Fourier has the merit at least of offering 
 the strongest safeguards for individual and local free- 
 dom. Fourier provided that every worker should have 
 the opportunity of gaining and maintaining a capital of 
 his own, but under such social regulation that it would 
 no longer involve wrong to others ; and further, he 
 arranged that the owner should have perfect freedom 
 
THE PURIFIED SOCIALISM 233 
 
 to transfer his services and his capital from one asso- 
 ciation to another. These are features of Fourier's 
 system which have been too much neglected by scientific 
 socialists so called ; and in these respects he is much 
 less Utopian than his critics. 
 
 In no question is the arbitrariness of the historic 
 socialism more apparent than in the artificial attempts 
 made to formulate a just method of distribution or 
 remuneration. We have in previous chapters indicated 
 the different methods proposed in the schools of Saint- 
 Simon, Fourier, and Louis Blanc. Nothing has so 
 much tended to give a Utopian air to socialistic specu- 
 lation. Our ideas of justice cannot well be expressed 
 in a single formula, however comprehensive. It has 
 been the endeavour more or less of all moralists 
 and legislators since the origin of human society to 
 elucidate it and reduce it to some kind of reasonable 
 form, but with only very imperfect results ; and 
 socialists are not now likely to succeed in a task which 
 is really impracticable. Progress in the realising of 
 justice can be attained only through the collective en- 
 lightenment and moral experience of the race ; and it 
 will always fall short of our ideals, for our ideals rise as 
 we approximate towards a realisation of them, and so 
 ever leave us behind in the race after perfection. 
 
 We need not say, however, that it is an obvious 
 implicate in every equitable theory of distribution -that 
 remuneration must generally depend on work or desert. 
 The normal income of the future must be based on 
 service rendered to society by all able members. 
 Eegard will be had to the needs of the disabled. 
 
234 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 It should be emphasised, moreover, that socialism must 
 assert the supremacy of morality over all the economic 
 processes— production and exchange as well as distribu- 
 tion. Production should be rational and systematic. 
 Above all, distribution, should be equitable. In these 
 respects socialism is fundamentally opposed to the 
 one-sided conception of competition which has been so 
 prevalent. It seeks to supersede the existing com- 
 petitive system of industry by a new order, in which 
 reason and equity shall prevail. 
 
 It should also be clear that socialism supplies the 
 much-needed complement and corrective of the principle 
 of natural liberty advocated by Adam Smith. The 
 principle of natural liberty had a great historical value, 
 and when rightly understood mast always be regarded 
 as a prime factor in every theory of social progress. But 
 it can be applied only under obvious limits, prescribed 
 by reason and morality. The natural liberty of 
 struggling individuals would, if unchecked, land us in 
 social chaos. The true freedom of human beings is a 
 rational and ethical freedom. Such principles ought to 
 prevail in the commercial relations of nations with 
 each other, as well as in every other department of our 
 industrial and social life. 
 v/SociaKsm, then, simply means that the normal social 
 organisation of the future will and should be an 
 associated or co-operative one. It means that industry 
 should be carried on by free associated workers. The 
 development of socialism will follow the development of 
 the large industry ; and it will rationally, scientifically, 
 and systematically use the mechanical appliances 
 
THE PURIFIED SOCIALISM 235 
 
 evolved during the industrial revolution for the pro- 
 motion of a higher life among the masses of the 
 people. 
 
 It is a new type of industry and economic organisa- 
 tion, the practicability of which must be decided by the 
 test of experience. It cannot be introduced mechani- 
 cally. We cannot force or improvise such a change in 
 the constitution of society. No revolutionary violence 
 can avail to carry through a transformation which 
 runs counter to the fundamental laws of human nature 
 or the great prevailing tendencies of social evolution. 
 This win be especially manifest when we consider that 
 its realisation will above all things depend on the 
 ethical advance of the mass of the people. Character 
 cannot be improved by magic ; it can be sub- 
 stantially ameliorated only by an organic change, 
 external circumstances co-operating with an inward 
 moral spirit. The present competitive system must 
 therefore be regarded as holding the field until socialism 
 has given adequate proof of the practicability of the 
 theory which it offers. In our further discussion of the 
 subject the theory of socialism which we contemplate 
 is socialism as elucidated in this chapter. 
 
OHAPTEE XI 
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY 
 
 The idea of evolution has had a great influence in the 
 history of socialistic speculation. Beginning with 
 Saint-Simon most socialists have recognised three 
 stages in the economic development of mankind — ■ 
 slavery, serfdom and wage-labour — which last they 
 believe will be displaced by an era of associated labour 
 with a collective capital. The idea of development 
 may indeed be regarded as essential to socialism, inas- 
 much as it must contemplate a succession of social- 
 economic changes in history. 
 
 Marx and Lassalle were both trained in the school of 
 Hegel, and naturally applied to the problems of society 
 the Hegelian theory of development. The principle 
 that economic categories are historical categories, so 
 much emphasised by Lassalle, was by him, as it was by 
 his fellow-labourers, merged in the wider and more 
 fundamental conception of evolution, historical econo- 
 mics thus becoming evolutionary economics. 
 
 Some of the later socialists see in the theory of 
 evolution associated with the name of Darwin a suitable 
 expression of their ideas of development. Followers of 
 Marx have found special points of attraction in 
 
SOCIALISM AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY 237 
 
 Darwinism. Darwin himself was of course not a 
 materialist ; but many speculators have not unreason- 
 ably recognised in his teachings an affinity with 
 materialism, which obviously accorded well with the 
 materialistic conception of history held by Marx. The 
 struggle of classes, which Marx regards as the key to 
 history, is, we need not say, also an allied feature. 
 
 But the Darwinian conception of development has to 
 many students suggested the strongest reasons for 
 doubt and hostility with reference to socialism. How 
 does the theory of the struggle for existence consist 
 with the harmony of interests contemplated by social- 
 ism ? Is it not Utopian of the Marx school to believe 
 that the struggle of classes, which has hitherto charac- 
 terised the course of history, can be brought to a close 
 by a great revolutionary act ? 
 
 Competition, that hite noire of the socialists, is 
 simply the social economic form of the struggle for 
 existence. Is not competition, therefore, the prime 
 condition of social progress? And is not socialism 
 therefore inconsistent with progress ? 
 
 Thus we are confronted with the twofold proT)lem, 
 whether socialism does not deny the cardinal principles 
 of evolution, and thereby also deny the prime condition 
 of social progress ? 
 
 These questions are of considerable complexity. 
 And their import will be better understood if we con- 
 sider them in relation to another question with which 
 they are intimately connected, and which is even more 
 fundamental — the population question. The Darwinian 
 theory of evolution rests on the Malthusian theory of 
 
238 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 population, and can be fully appreciated only by refer- 
 ence to it. 
 
 In this place we need not discuss the theory of 
 population as a whole, but merely in so far as it bears 
 on our present inquiry. The theory of Malthus is so 
 remarkable for its simplicity that no worthy excuse can 
 be offered for the misconceptions regarding it which 
 have been prevalent. The seeds of life, so runs the 
 theory of Malthus, have been scattered throughout the 
 world with a profuse and liberal hand. All living 
 thiugs tend to multiply indefinitely. Animals — even 
 the least prolific — would, if their increase were not 
 checked, fill the entire world. But as the means of 
 subsistence are limited, the struggle for existence in- 
 evitably ensues, which is obviously all the more intense 
 because so many animals are themselves the means of 
 subsistence to others. 
 
 So with man. If his natural powers of increase 
 were exercised without check, it is only a question of 
 time when the globe itself would be too small for the 
 numbers of human beings, even though equipped with 
 the most effective means of cultivation. ■ In point of 
 fact population has almost always pressed on the avail- 
 able means of subsistence. The only important excep- 
 tions are found in new countries, when opened up to 
 colonists who have brought with them the superior 
 methods of exploitation developed in more advanced 
 civilisations. 
 
 Thus the history of the human race is largely the 
 record of a struggle for the means of subsistence caused 
 by the pressure of population. Not that the popula- 
 
SOCIALISM AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY 239 
 
 tion is necessarily dense. Some of the most thinly 
 scattered peoples have had the greatest difficulty in 
 making a living, simply because the available means of 
 subsistence were exceptionally scanty, as the North 
 American Indians, and above all in the continent of 
 Australia before its settlement by Europeans. The 
 study of human history shows that if the population 
 was small, it was not owing to any defect in the 
 natural powers of increase of human beings. 
 
 It will be seen that the Malthusian theory rests on 
 two great facts : (1) on a physiological fact, viz., that 
 all human beings are capable of indefinite increase ; 
 and (2) on a natural economic fact, that the means of 
 subsistence are not capable of a corresponding indefinite 
 increase, the ultimate reason of this being nothing else 
 than the limited size of the planet on which we live. 
 The inevitable result is the struggle for existence. The 
 Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence has 
 the widest application to human society and human 
 history. 
 
 This struggle has gone on through a great variety of 
 stages. In the earliest phases, of human history it 
 generally resulted in the extermination of the van- 
 quished, and was often associated with cannibalism. 
 As society advanced from the hunting and pastoral 
 into the agricultural state, the victors saw that it would 
 be their interest to spare the vanquished to enjoy the 
 benefit of their labour as slaves. In this way began 
 the institution of slavery, on which ancient civilisation 
 rested. The warlike tribes that overturned the Eoman 
 Empire found that they could more easily and conve- 
 
240 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 niently utilise the labour o£ the vanquished under the 
 various forms of serfdom. In modern times free 
 workers, destitute of capital, are ready under a system 
 of competition to perform the labour of society for a 
 wage that renders them the customary subsistence. 
 
 In the earliest stages the struggle was one for bare 
 existence, not far removed above the lower animals ; 
 bat as time went on, it began, as we have seen, to take 
 a higher form. The main motive power, however, has 
 always been the self -regarding principle in which the 
 struggle originated. On the whole it was only a more 
 rational and enlightened self-interest which dictated 
 the change from extermination to slavery, from slavery 
 to serfdom, and from serfdom to the system of competi- 
 tive free labour. Idealism, the longing for a better 
 Ufe, has always had a considerable power in human 
 affairs, and we hope that its influence will never cease 
 to grow and prevail. Yet it could not be seriously 
 maintained that the peoples who instituted slavery, serf- 
 dom, or the competitive system, were in the main 
 actuated by ideal or high ethical motives. It is our 
 duty to recognise with thankfulness that the inevitable 
 progress of society has brought with it a higher life, 
 even though it be merely due to a more enlightened 
 self-interest. 
 
 Thus, while in its early stages it was a struggle for 
 mere existence, in later times it has become more and 
 more a struggle for a privileged or superior existence. 
 The victors in most historic struggles have reserved to 
 themselves the loftier functions of government, war and 
 the chase, and the vanquished have been constrained to 
 
SOCIALISM AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY 241 
 
 provide a subsistence both for their masters and them- 
 selves by means of labour. Life still is a struggle for 
 the best places in society. And it is a particular object 
 of struggle not to belong to the class of manual labour. 
 
 The competitive system is the latest form of the 
 struggle for existence. It is not an accident, but the 
 outcome of the prevalent historic forces. The time 
 had come when free labour was found to be more 
 efficient, than servile labour. The feudal system, of 
 which serfdom was a part, went down before the 
 strongly centralised state. The competitive system is 
 the form assumed by the struggle for existence in 
 societies which were controlled by powerful central 
 governments ; it is industrial freedom under conditions 
 of legality enforced by strongly constitated govern- 
 ments. In earlier and less settled states of society the 
 struggle for existence used to be decided by more 
 direct and forcible methods. In other days men slew 
 their rivals ; at the present time they undersell them. 
 
 And we need not say that the competitive system 
 has been a process of selection, bringing to the front, as 
 leaders of industry and also as heads of society, the 
 fittest men. 
 
 The struggle for existence therefore has continued 
 through human history, and does still continue. And 
 we may feel assured that under the pressure of an ever- 
 increasing population it will continue. The only ques- 
 tion is regarding the form it is likely to take in the 
 historic conditions which now tend to prevail all over 
 the world. 
 
 For no conclusive solution of the population question 
 16 
 
542 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISE 
 
 is possible under any system. It has been a funda- 
 mental difficulty since the beginning of human society, 
 and more than anything else may be regarded as the 
 key to history. The migrations, wars, and conquests 
 recorded in history have for the most part had their 
 origin in want caused by the pressure of population on 
 the extant means of subsistence. No doubt, ambition, 
 vanity, suspicion, and restlessness have played a very 
 considerable part of their own in the military annals of 
 the race, but not nearly so large a part as is generally 
 supposed. Historians have not given anything like 
 adequate attention to the economic factors which have 
 often so decisively operated in human affairs. 
 
 In its most comprehensive form, indeed, the jiopula- 
 tion question does not concern the immediate future, 
 for the world is not nearly replenished with human 
 beings. In all the countries dominated by European 
 civilisation, wealth has, owing to the vast mechanical 
 development of the last hundred, years, increased much 
 more rapidly than population. But the question is one 
 which does already practically concern the more populous 
 centres over large areas of the world. In many of the 
 old seats of population, both in Europe and the East, 
 l:he struggle for existence is intense, and if not strongly 
 counteracted, must tend to the increase of egotism, un- 
 scrupulousness, and general demoralisation. This is 
 most observable in cases where a large population has to 
 face the prospect of a declining prosperity. If the 
 prosperity of this country were menaced by a great war, 
 or a great shock to the national credit, or by both to- 
 gether, or simply by the slow decline of its industrial 
 
SOCIALISM AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY 243 
 
 and commercial supremacy, the struggle for existence 
 in our large towns would be unspeakable. 
 
 It is obvious, therefore, that we are not yet done with 
 the problem of population. It is always a serious 
 matter in the great centres; it may, under very 
 conceivable circumstances, be a fearful dilemma at no 
 very distant date; and as the world becomes more 
 thickly peopled it" will more and more present itself as 
 a pressing question. "We cannot here, however, enter 
 into a detailed discussion of the problem. It will pro- 
 bably always be a difficulty, and will call forth a 
 variety of answers. But, as we have already said, no 
 satisfactory and conclusive solution can be oflFered or 
 expected by any one who understands the conditions 
 of the problem. The solution must wait on the moral 
 and social development of mankind. There is cer- 
 tainly .no prospect of the question being materially 
 affected by any physiological modification of the human 
 constitution. "We can only hope that the present pro- 
 gress of civilised countries in morality, intelligence, and 
 in a reasonable standard of living, will continue ; that 
 the improvement in material and economic conditions 
 will go hand in hand with ethical advancement ; that 
 the happiness of mankind will not be wrecked by the 
 irrational and unrestrained gratification of a single 
 passion. If the mass of the people remain as they are, 
 ready to sacrifice their own happiness and that of pos- 
 terity to animal instinct, the population question can- 
 not be solved, and the best hopes of human progress 
 must be unfulfilled. 
 
 For socialism, as we have explained it, it may be 
 
244 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 claimed that it gives the strongest guarantees that the 
 difficulty will receive the best and most rational treat- 
 ment. As socialism generally means the supremacy of 
 reason and morals over the nattiral forces, so with 
 reference to the population question it means that 
 natural appetite should be controlled by nobler and 
 more rational feelings and principles. Under a social- 
 istic system every member of the community will be 
 interested in this as in every other serious question. 
 The general enlightenment and the social conscience 
 will most powerfully co-operate with the light and the 
 conscience of the individual to effect a reasonable and a 
 beneficent solution, so far as possible. 
 
 But we must now return to the questions with which 
 we started — the ifelation of socialism to the struggle 
 for existence, and to social progress as dependent on 
 the struggle for existence. As we have seen, the 
 Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence has the 
 widest application to human society and human history. 
 But the struggle for existence is not the sole principle 
 of social progress. Social progress proceeds from the 
 interaction, the balance and harmony, of many prin- 
 ciples. The general question of social development, in 
 which that of progress is involved, must be regarded in 
 the light of the following considerations. Only we 
 must premise that they are not a contradiction of the 
 Darwinian theory ; they are to be taken as a comple- 
 ment of it, and a correction of the narrow and one- 
 sided conception of the theory. 
 
 (i) The political, social, and ethical development of 
 
SOCIALISM AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY 245 
 
 mankind is largely a record of the endeavour to place 
 the struggle for existence under regulation. Progress 
 chiefly and supremely consists in the growing control 
 of ethical principle over all the forms of selfishness, 
 egotism, unscrupulousness, and cruelty called forth by 
 such struggle. In other words, progress mainly consists 
 in the growing supremacy of law, order and morality 
 over the excess of the self-regarding principle in which 
 the individual struggle has its root. We do not say 
 that this exhausts the meaning of the ethical develop- 
 ment of man, but it is a most important aspect of it. 
 
 Thus the ethical factor is the decisive one in human 
 progress, but it has advanced pari passu with the 
 general social and political progress. We see it in the 
 crudest and most elementary forms when man emerged 
 from the darkness of pre-historic times, and it has 
 gradually developed into a noble complex of ideals, 
 informed by a growing knowledge and by widening 
 sympathies. In short, liuman progress has been a 
 continual effort towards the realisation of the true, the 
 beautiful, and the good, in such measure as was 
 attainable by each succeeding generation of the race. 
 
 Not that • the struggle for existence is hereby 
 abolished. The struggle, and the regulation of it too, 
 are carried forward into a further stage of progress, to 
 be continued on a higher social and ethical plane. The 
 human struggle generally is on a higher plane than the 
 animal one which Darwin describes. It is a struggle 
 on the plane of an intelligence which never ceases to 
 develop, amongst beings who pursue social and ethical 
 aims with growing clearness and energy. If the 
 
246 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 results still fall so far below our aims, it is because our 
 intelligence and means of performance, though en- 
 larging, are still very imperfect. 
 
 What we call natural selection in the animal world 
 is in human history transformed, elevated, and 
 idealised ; it becomes social selection. We may call it 
 natural, if we please; only, we must remember the 
 greatly altered character of the agents concerned in it. 
 While at every stage we see moral and intellectual 
 growth, we must particularly remember that the new 
 society for which socialists strive will consist of asso- 
 ciated free beings acting under the regulation and 
 stimulus of high ethical and artistic ends and ideals. 
 
 Nothing, therefore, can be more narrow and one- 
 sided than to consider the struggle for existence as the 
 sole lever of human progress. Such one-sided insist- 
 ence on the idea of struggle is to deny the whole ethical 
 development of the world. 
 
 Socialism professes to continue and promote the 
 ethical and social development which we have de- 
 scribed ; on a higher plane of progress than has hitherto 
 been reached to place the natural economic powers 
 operating in human destiny under the regulation of 
 reason, moral principle, and ideals of beauty ; to render 
 technical and mechanical appliances, and all the 
 material and economic factors underlying human life, 
 subservient to the well-being of man in a way hitherto 
 iinattained ; and so to achieve the ethical freedom of 
 man and his rational supremacy over the world. The 
 competitive system is the latest phase in the struggle 
 for existence, and socialism is the latest theory for the 
 
SOCIALISM AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY 247 
 
 regulation of it along the well-approved lines of human 
 progress. 
 
 By such testa, none lower or narrower, must a rational 
 socialism be tried. 
 
 (2) There is, however, one side of this ethical pro- 
 gress which deserves to be more particularly considered. 
 The ethical progress of man is largely a development of 
 the principle of sociality, community, or association. 
 This principle has its centre in the family, with all that 
 is implied therein ; in the association of man and 
 woman, in the sacrifices made by both and especially 
 by the mother for the children'. Historically, it has de- 
 veloped from the tribe into ever wider and more complex 
 forms — the city, nation, and race — until it more and 
 more embraces the whole human family. That is, it 
 finally tends to become international, so that the whole 
 human family may be included in common ethical and 
 social bonds, a state of things which is still far from 
 being realised, but it is in process. 
 
 In the evolution of living things two factors have been 
 decisive, the development of brain power and the deve- 
 lopment of the social principle. We need scarcely add 
 that the two are intimately connected, and further that 
 the brain power of man is closely co-ordinated with his 
 physical development. The supremacy of man is due 
 to his brain power and to his readiness to associate for 
 common ends, far more than to his strength or hardi- 
 hood, in which he is greatly excelled by other animals. 
 The entire -history of civilisation bears witness to the 
 potency of the two factors ; for it is a truism to say that the 
 communities and races that have excelled in brain power 
 
348 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 and in the family and social moraKties have prevailed. 
 A rational socialism might be defined as the mastery of 
 associated human intelligence over the resources of nature 
 for the general good. In this respect, also, the success 
 of socialism would simply mark the continuous de- 
 velopment of man along the tested and approved lines 
 of progress. 
 
 It is no doubt one of the many exaggerations of 
 Lassalle, due partly to his function of agitator, that he 
 laid excessive emphasis on the principle of community 
 as the lever of progress, compared with the individual 
 principle. Progress has always depended on the action 
 and interaction of both principles. It is rather an idle 
 question, which of the two is the more important ; like 
 that other question, whether the great man makes the 
 age, or the age makes the great man. The man and 
 the age make each other. 
 
 We know the great influence often exerted in history 
 by exceptional brain power or character, and both are 
 often associated with a prominent individual. But 
 high individual capacity is usually, if not always, found 
 in an age and community with a high average of talent. 
 Well-organised and well-endowed societies are most 
 likely to produce the strongest and finest individuals, 
 and it is only in such societies that the greatest 
 individuals are likely to find adequate scope for their 
 powers. We cannot make a just estimate of our 
 subject unless we give due weight to both principles, 
 but obviously the danger to society lies in the excessive 
 development of the individual principle. History has 
 too often witnessed the abnormal development of private 
 
SOCIALISM AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY 249 
 
 selfishness, so overgrown as to weaken and finally 
 dissolve the society in which it acted, thus accomplish- 
 ing its own destruction. This is indeed the open secret 
 of the ruin of most communities that have existed. 
 We should seek in vain for an instance of a community 
 ruined by excessive regard for the public good. A 
 happy and wholesome individual development can be 
 secured only by healthy relation and due subordination 
 to society and the common weal. 
 
 It will be seen, then, that the principle of sociality or 
 of association plays a specially important part in human 
 development. Yet in close connection with it we again 
 observe the wide operation of the struggle for existence. 
 The struggle for existence is not only a struggle of in- 
 dividuals against each other. It has also been a 
 struggle of tribe against tribe, of city against city, of 
 nation against nation, and race against race. In the 
 existing society it is, moreover, a struggle of classes 
 against each other. Considered in this aspect, which 
 is too obvious to require illustration, the struggle for 
 existence has assumed the most complicated forms, and 
 has had the greatest influence in the history of the 
 world. And the intensity of the struggle has called 
 forth some of the highest human qualities — in- 
 ventiveness, capacity for organisation, submission to 
 discipline, enthusiasm, heroism and self-sacrifice. The 
 struggle, hateful though it be in many respects, has 
 been one of the great training schools of the human 
 race. 
 
 Modern Baropean' history is an impressive example 
 of the importance of this struggle for existence. The 
 
250 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 progress of Europe is greatly owing to the fact that in 
 this continent we have a group of communities which 
 are closely related, ^et independent, and rivals. In 
 every department of activity they learn from each other, 
 and spur one another on by continual emulation. Each 
 must follow its rivals in the adoption of every new 
 improvement, under penalty of decline and even ruin. 
 Communities like China and India in the old world, and 
 the native States of Mexico and Peru in the new world, 
 were isolated, and therefore stationary. 
 
 Under the existing conditions, a social organisation 
 favourable to the development of the intelligence, 
 energy, and enthusiasm of the mass of the people is 
 more and more necessary to success in the keen and 
 arduous struggle waged by the -European communities. 
 The future both of democracy and of socialism will 
 largely depend on how far they can supply these advan- 
 tages of organisation. For it is a struggle also between 
 forms of social organisation. Any better form of 
 organisation, when adopted by one of the communities, 
 must also be adopted by its rivals. As soon as it was 
 recognised that universal education and universal lia- 
 bility to military duty gave Prussia an exceptional 
 advantage in the European struggle, other nations 
 have been eager to follow. 
 
 Thus, through the development of the principle of 
 sociality in the history of civilisation, the struggle fot 
 existence is not abolished. It is continued under more 
 complex conditions, on a wider scale, over larger areas, 
 by greater masses of organised men, with mightier 
 weapons and vaster resources, 
 
SOCIALISM AND THE EVOLUTION THEORY 251 
 
 (3) It is one of the most interesting aspects of 
 history, that we regard it as the education of the human 
 race. Social progress is the result of a long pro- 
 cess of discipline, and the training has often been 
 most severe. It would appear as if mankind needed 
 to be goaded and driven forward on the path of im- 
 provement. 
 
 The theory of the struggle for existence throws new 
 light on the education of humanity. The nations of 
 the world have been schoolmasters to each other ; and 
 the competitive system, too, has been a process of disci- 
 pline for all who have been concerned in it. Socialism, 
 rightly understood, may be regarded as a new phase of 
 the discipliae of humanity. For the transition into 
 socialism, if attainable at all, will be more difficult 
 than many suppose. It must be gradual, preparing the 
 minds and morals, the habits and institutions, of the 
 mass of the people for a higher form of social economic 
 life. As isolated individuals, the working-class have 
 no prospect of success. They can make progress only 
 by practising the virtues of combination, foresight, 
 self-control, self-denial, discernment in choosing their 
 leaders, loyalty, unwearying perseverance in well-doing. 
 These qualities have been already cultivated in them 
 by means of their trades-unions and co-operative 
 societies. The process of socialistic evolution will 
 carry on the process of social-economic education. 
 
 Socialism must, therefore, be regarded as providing 
 an economic and social discipliue for all men who have 
 the requisite insight, and particularly for the working- 
 class, who are its special representatives and promoters, 
 
252 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 It will offer fresh scope and opportunity to the working- 
 class as a whole. But it will also be a process of 
 social selection, for while inviting all, it will attract the 
 fittest and most worthy, and lead them on to higher 
 things. 
 
OHAPTEE XII 
 
 RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 
 
 The most remarkable feature in tlie recent history of 
 socialism has been the marvellous growth of the social- 
 democratic party in Germany. At Lassalle's death in 
 1864, the Universal Working-men's Association formed 
 by him numbered only 4610 members. After losing 
 its founder, the Association had a changeful and 
 precarious career. Jealousy, quarrelling, and confusion 
 reigned amongst its leaders. There would, however, 
 be no profit in narrating the petty squabbles which 
 disturbed its progress. Under the presidency of Von 
 Schweitzer, which lasted four years, 1867-71, it began 
 moderately to flourish. Von Schweitzer was a man of 
 ability, who controlled it in the spirit of Lassalle, 
 seeking particularly to guide the agitation within the 
 national lines contemplated by the founder. 
 
 In this aim Von Schweitzer encountered a most 
 resolute opposition from a new party which had mean- 
 while been forming. Of the workmen's unions, which 
 had grown so rapidly in Germany in the years following 
 i860, some had attached themselves to the national 
 socialism of Lassalle, but from the first many had held 
 aloof from him. Two men were specially responsible 
 
254 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 for this result — Wilhelm LiebknecLt and August 
 Bebel. W. Liebknecht had taken an actiTe part in 
 the revolutionary disturbances of 1848, had been a 
 member of the group of exiles that gathered round 
 Karl Marx in London, and from him had imbibed the 
 principles of international revolutionary socialism. 
 Liebknecht had joined the Universal Association of 
 Lassalle, but he never enjoyed the entire confidence of 
 his chief, and after his death proceeded to follow wider 
 aims than those proposed by Lassalle. August Bebel 
 was a workman, who by natural talent and force of 
 character had gained considerable influence among his 
 comrades. Being a convinced Radical, Bebel enter- 
 tained no affection for a socialistic agitation, which was 
 to adapt itself so much to Prussian nationalism. 
 Before long Liebknecht found in Bebel a ready reci- 
 pient of the international socialism of Marx. 
 
 The result of the influence of Liebknecht on Bebel, 
 and of both on the working-men's unions, was the 
 formation of a party favourable to international 
 socialism. The transition from what we would call 
 radicalism to international revolutionary socialism was 
 accomplished in a very few years. The federation of 
 German unions, which was founded in 1863, declared in 
 1865 for universal suffrage. In 1866 their committee 
 pronounced against the Schulze-Delitzsch scheme. They 
 had thus already abandoned the Progressist platform 
 entirely. At the congress of Nuremberg in 1 868 the 
 unions by a large majority, declared their adhesion to 
 the International. In a great congress at Eisenach in 
 1869, they founded the Social Democratic Working- 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 255 
 
 men's party, and in the same year sent representatives 
 to the International Congress at Basel. 
 
 Socialism was strong enough in the constituencies of 
 the Fatherland to send five members to the first North 
 German Diet in 1 867. During the Franco-German war 
 of 1870-71 the flood of patriotic enthusiasm for a time 
 almost submerged the socialistic agitation. For the 
 German Diet in 1871 the socialists counted only 
 1 20,000 votes, and returned two members. When the 
 war fever subsided, the agitation resumed its course, 
 and it was fostered by the wild speculation and the 
 industrial crisis of the year 1873. -^^ the elections of 
 1874 the socialistic parties polled 340,000 votes, and 
 returned nine members. 
 
 From Lassalle's first appearance on the scene in 
 1862, the socialistic agitation had encountered the 
 German police at every step of its career. Its leaders 
 were prosecuted, driven into exile, and thrown into 
 prison. Meetings were broken up, newspapers and 
 organisations were suppressed. The right of free 
 speech and of free assembly was curtailed in every 
 way. All these measures availed not to repress the 
 movement ; they broke on the resolute resistance of 
 the social-democrats, against an organisation intel- 
 ligent and solid yet elastic, which had its basis in the 
 minds and hearts of the German workmen. Such 
 experience taught the socialist leaders the advantage 
 and necessity of union in the face of the common 
 enemy. The retirement of Von Schweitzer from the 
 control of the Lassalle party in 1871 removed the 
 most serious obstacle to union. That party no longer 
 
256 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 had a leader that could sustain a comparison with 
 Bebel and Liebknecht. Moreover, the incessant atten- 
 tions of the German police had not tended to foster the 
 spirit of patriotism in the ranks of the national 
 .socialism. Thus, partly through its own inner ten- 
 dencies, and partly under the pressure of its evil 
 experiences with the police, German socialism passed 
 into an attitude of uncompromising hostility to the 
 Government. Human nature and the German Govern- 
 ment beijig as they are, such a result was inevitable. 
 Under these circumstances the process of union was 
 easy, and the fusion of the Eisenach and Lassalle parties 
 was effected in a congress at Gotha in 1875. At this 
 congress 25,000 regular members were represented, of 
 whom 9000 belonged to the Marx party and 15,000 to 
 that of Lassalle. The united body assumed the name 
 of the Socialistic Working-men's party of Germany, 
 and drew up a programme, which, as the most im- 
 portant hitherto published by any socialistic organisa- 
 tion, deserves to be given entire.* 
 
 The union of the two parties, accomplished at Gotha 
 under the circumstances which we have described, was 
 the starting-point of a new career of prosperity for the 
 German social-democracy. At the election of 1877 the 
 new party polled nearly half a million votes, and re- 
 turned twelve members to the Eeichstag. This result 
 was largely due to the admirable organisation to which 
 the socialistic propaganda had now attained. A staff of 
 skilful, intelligent, and energetic agitators advocated 
 the new creed in every town of Germany, and they 
 * See Appendix. 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 257 
 
 were supported by an effective machinery of news- 
 papers, pamphlets, treatises, social gatherings, and even 
 almanacs, in which the doctrines of socialism were sug- 
 gested, inculcated, and enforced in every available way. 
 At all the great centres of population — in Berlin, 
 Hamburg, and in the industrial towns of Saxony and 
 on the Rhine — the social-democrats threatened to be- 
 come the strongest party. 
 
 Such a rate of progress, and the aggressive attitude 
 of the spokesmen of the party, naturally awakened the 
 apprehensions of the German rulers. They resolved to 
 meet it by special legislation. The social-democrat 
 programme contained nothing that was absolutely in- 
 consistent with the idea of a peaceful development 
 out of the existing state. As we have seen, it is a 
 principle of the Marx socialism that its realisation 
 depends on the inherent tendencies of social evolution ; 
 but the process can be hastened by the intelligent and 
 energetic co-operation of living men, and as this co- 
 operation may take the shape of revolutionary force, 
 and was actually in Germany assuming a most aggres- 
 sive and menacing attitude, both on the platform and 
 in the press, it was inevitable that the German Govern- 
 ment should adopt measures to repress it. 
 
 The occasion of the anti-socialist legislation was founc 
 in the attempts of Hodel and Nobiling on the Emperor's 
 life in 1878. It is needless to say that neither attempt 
 was authorised by the social- democratic party. The 
 two men had no official connection with the party 
 Both were, weak in character and intellect. Theii 
 feeble brains had been excited by the socialistic 
 
 17 
 
258 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 doctrines which were fermenting around them. No 
 further responsibility for their acts attaches to the 
 social-democratic party, whose principles and interests 
 were entirely opposed to such attempts at assassina- 
 tion. 
 
 The Bill introduced after the attempt of Hodel was 
 rejected by the Reichstag. On the attempt of Nobiling 
 the Government dissolved the Reichstag and appealed 
 to the country, with the result that a large majority 
 favourable to exceptional legislation was returned. 
 And severe anti-socialist laws were speedily carried. 
 
 A most interesting feature of the discussions which 
 took place in connection with the exceptional legisla- 
 tion was the attitude of Bismarck. Now when the 
 great statesman has been removed from his high 
 position as Chancellor of the German Empire, and 
 arbiter of the politics of Europe, it is specially necessary 
 to state that he approached the subject of socialism 
 with an open-mindedness which does him honour. He 
 felt it his duty to make himself acquainted with all the 
 facts relating to his ofBce, and took particular pains to 
 understand the new social and economic problems 
 which were engaging the attention of the country. 
 
 In a sitting of the Reichstag on September 17, 
 1878, he did not hesitate to express his sympathy and 
 even respect for Lassalle. He explained how he had 
 met Lassalle three or four times at the request of the 
 latter, and had not regretted it. Referring to baseless 
 rumours that had been circulated to the effect that he 
 had been willing to enter into negotiation with the 
 agitator, he stated that their relations could not have 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 239 
 
 taken the form of a political transaction, for Lassalle 
 had nothing to offer him, and there could be no bar- 
 gain when one of the parties had nothing to give. ' But 
 Lassalle had something,' Bismarck went on to say, 
 ' that attracted me exceedingly as a private man. He 
 was one of the cleverest and most amiable men with 
 whom I ever met ; a man who was ambitious in great 
 style, and by no means a republican ; he had a very 
 strongly marked national and monarchical feeling, the 
 idea which he strove to realise was the German Empire, 
 and therein we had common ground. Lassalle was 
 ambitious in the grand style ; it was doubtful perhaps 
 whether the German Empire should close with the 
 HohenzoUern dynasty or the dynasty Lassalle, yet his 
 feeling was monarchical through and through. . . . 
 Lassalle was an energetic and most intellectual man, 
 whose conversation was very instructive ; our talks 
 lasted for hours, and I always regretted when they 
 came to an end. ... I should have been glad to have 
 had a man of such endowments and genius as neigh- 
 bouring landlord.' 
 
 It should be added also that Bismarck saw no objec- 
 tion in principle to the scheme of productive associations 
 with State help recommended by Lassalle. Such 
 experiments were not unreasonable in, themselves, and 
 were entirely consistent with the range of duties 
 recognised by the State as he understood them. But 
 the course of political events had not left him the 
 necessary leisure ; in other words the too engrossing 
 demands of war and diplomacy had set aside the con- 
 sideration of the claims of labour. 
 
26o THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 In his speech in the Eeichstag of September 17, 
 1878, the Chancellor also explained the origin of his 
 hostility to the social democracy. One of its leading 
 representatives, either Bebel or Liebknecht, had in 
 open sitting expressed his sympathy with the Commune 
 at Paris. That reference to the Commune has been a 
 ray of light on the question ;- from that time he felt 
 entirely convinced that the social-democracy was an 
 enemy against which the State and society must arm 
 themselves. 
 
 The efforts of Bispjiarck against socialism did ap- 
 parently have'a temporary success, for at the election 
 of 1878, the voting power of the party sank to 415,000, 
 and in 188 1 to about 312,000. But it was only tem- 
 porary and probably it was more apparent than real. 
 The elections in 1884 showed a marked increase to 
 549,000, which in 1887 rose to 763,000. These symp- 
 toms of growth were, however, vastly exceeded by the 
 results of the poll in 1 890, when the number of social- 
 democratic votes swelled to 1,427,000, The socialists 
 are now the strongest single party of the Empire. They 
 have left the Rational-Liberals far behind, and are 
 nearly 100,000 stronger than the centre or Catholic 
 party. 
 
 Next in significance to the fact of such an enormous 
 increase are ^certain features in the mode of increase. 
 Till 1890, the social-democrats had by their own con- 
 fession made very little progress in country districts or 
 among the Catholic population either of town or 
 country. At the election of 1 890, there was evidence 
 ■of a very considerable advance in both quarters. 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 261 
 
 In strong contrast with tlie large number .of votes, 
 however, is the small number of representatives re- 
 turned to the Eeichstag, only thirty-five out of a total of 
 397. If the representation of the socialists corresponded 
 with their voting power, they would have nearly eighty 
 members. The discrepancy is explained on two grounds. 
 The constituencies, in which the social democrats pre- 
 vail, arg the towns and industrial centres, which have 
 greatly grown in population since the time when the 
 present electoral divisions was arranged. And when 
 there is a second ballot, as provided for by the German 
 electoral system, the other parties generally combine 
 against the revolutionary party. 
 
 In any case the elections of Pebriiary 20, 1890, 
 have proved the extraordinary vitality of the socialist 
 movement in Germany. The social-democrats have 
 shown a patience, resolution, discipline and power of 
 organisation, which are probably unexampled in the 
 annals of the labour movement since the beginning of 
 human society. They have made a steady and un- 
 flinching resistance to the most powerful statesman of 
 his time, supported by the strongest legions in the 
 world, by a most vigorous police, and by a press that 
 used every available means to discredit the new move- 
 ment ; and as a party they have never been provoked 
 to acts of violence. In fact, they have given proof of 
 all the high qualities, which fit men and parties to play 
 a great rdle in history. Since the discontinuance of 
 the special legislation against socialists in 1890, the 
 leaders of the social-democrats have been careful to 
 follow a temperate and peaceful policy. A small number 
 
262 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 of tlie party have pronounced for more energetic opposi- 
 tion to the existing order, but the vast majority adhere 
 to their experienced chiefs. The social-democratic 
 movement in Germany is one of the most notable 
 phenomena of the nineteenth century. 
 
 As we have already said, the Gotha programme con- 
 tains nothing which could not conceivably be realised 
 by a process of peaceful development out of the exist- 
 ing state. It aims at a great transformation in the 
 arrangement of property, and in the methods of j)ro- 
 duction and distribution; but they believe that the 
 transformation can be expected only as the result of 
 natural economic causes. Though conscious of the 
 international character of the movement, it also re- 
 cognises the State. It treats reUgion as a private 
 matter, and proposes no change in marriage. Many 
 of its proposals would be approved by every en- 
 lightened thinker; some of the most fundamental 
 would be regarded as speculative views which must be 
 left to the experience of the future. If the social- 
 democrats had been content to set forth their pro- 
 gramme in a reasonably temperate' way, the Eeichstag 
 would in all probability never have been asked to pass 
 exceptional laws against them. 
 
 But many of their leaders have avowed opinions, 
 which are much more revolutionary than their pro- 
 gramme. Bebel, for example, has declared himself in 
 politics a republican, in economics a socialist, and 
 as regards religion, an atheist ; and in his book on 
 TVoman* he advocates views subversive of the jjresent 
 * Die Frau unci der Sozialismus, loth ed. 1891. 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 263 
 
 iustitutions relating to marriage and the bringing up 
 of cliildren. It would probably, however, be a serious 
 error to regard his opinions in these matters as repre- 
 sentative o£ German socialism. It should be judged 
 by its official programme. On the other hand there 
 can be no doubt that in their utterances on the plat- 
 form and in the press the social-democrats have been ag- 
 gi'essive and revolutionary on the fundamental ques- 
 tions of the German social order to a degree which fully 
 explains the action of the German government. 
 
 In most European countries socialism has made con- 
 siderable progress in recent years ; but out of Germany 
 it has no such results to record, as we have been narra- 
 ting. In Denmark, France and Italy, the socialists are 
 strong enough to send a very small number of deputies 
 to the legislatures. In France they are numerous only in 
 the large, towns and in the industrial centres. Socialists, 
 however, form the majority in a number of French 
 communes. Anarchism ap^sears to have a large and 
 increasing force of adherents in Italy and Spain, but 
 it is mostly latent, and therefore cannot easily be 
 measured. Probably the most striking feature in 
 recent history may be found in the symptoms, that so 
 frequently appear, of a latent and undefined socialism, 
 which only needs a fitting occasion to call it forth, 
 and which forms a serious but incalculable quantity in 
 the social forces of the time. In a country like Eussia, 
 where all the ordinary means of expressing public 
 opinion are suppressed, it is not easy to tell how far 
 the revolutionary movement is now spreading. 
 
 After the decline of the Owen agitation, and of 
 
.264 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 the Christian socialist movement in 1850, Socialism 
 ■could hardly be said to exist in England. Where it 
 attracted any attention at all, it was generally re- 
 garded as a revolutionary curiosity peculiar to the 
 Continent, and which had little practical interest for 
 & free and normal country like our own. About 1883, 
 it took a fresh start indirectly through the influence 
 •of Mr. Henry George and directly through the teach- 
 ing of Karl Marx. By his vigorous and sympathetic 
 eloquence Mr. Henry George gained a wide hearing 
 ior opinions, which were not distinctly socialistic, but 
 •certainly tended to disturb the existing modes of 
 thought. Though it led to little positive result, the 
 agitation connected with his name was really the 
 beginning of a radical change in English economics. 
 The teaching of Marx was taken up by the Social 
 Democratic federation and with great fervour preached 
 to the English people. The Socialist League diverged 
 from the Federation on grounds of difference, which 
 were partly personal, partly due to principle, for the 
 League has 'shown a decided sympathy with the 
 anarchist theory of socialism. In the Fabian Society 
 we see a genuine and partially successful attempt to 
 adapt socialism to the special circumstances of this 
 country. All sections have included men of real 
 culture and ability ; but on the whole recent EngUsh 
 socialism has been seriously injured by a too loyal 
 adherence to the too abstract traditions of the Marx 
 and other forms of continental socialism. 
 
 What we may call the avowed and organised 
 socialism has made little headway in the United 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 265 
 
 States of America or in the Bnglish colonies. Labour 
 questions, and especially the movement for a normal 
 working-day, have on the other hand attained to a 
 very high state of development, especially in Australia 
 The struggle between trades-unionism and the em- 
 ployers' combinations is carried on with an energy and 
 comprehensiveness which can hardly be equalled in 
 any part of the old world. The programme of the 
 Knights of Labour, which, in spite of recent reverses, 
 is still a powerful body, is the nearest approach to 
 socialism made by any great labour combination in 
 America. 
 
 The result of our brief review is, that except in Ger- 
 many, the avowed and organised socialism does not 
 pount a very formidable number of adherents. On the 
 other hand it is equally clear that socialistic theories 
 have made a wide and deep impression on the opinion 
 of most countries of the civilised world. Socialism has 
 been a standing challenge to the economic theories so 
 long prevalent : it is a protest against the existing 
 social-economic order ; and as such it has been dis- 
 cussed on every platform, in all journals, and we may 
 venture to say in every private gathering, with some 
 comprehension of its nature and aims. Whatever the 
 issue may be, it is very improbable that reasonable men 
 can ever again regard the competitive system of econo- 
 mics with the same satisfaction as formerly. The mere 
 fact that we can survey and analyse great ideas and 
 institutions with critical objectiveness is a proof that we 
 are looking back upon them, and that we have already 
 
266 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 so far left them behind ia the onward march of progress. 
 In countries where the socialistic theory is accepted in 
 its entirety only by a few, it has nevertheless effected 
 a great change in opinion. It is hardly an exaggera- 
 tion to say that the orthodox political economy, if it 
 exist anywhere, survives only in old books and in the 
 minds of a diminishing band of doctrinaires. Friends 
 of the existing order would, now almost have us believe 
 that it never existed, at all, which at least may be taken 
 as a sufficient proof that its days are numbered. Under 
 these circumstances it is not surprising that we do not 
 at present possess a settled political economy. 
 
 We may best consider the growing inflaence of 
 socialistic ideas on current opinion under the following 
 heads : — 
 
 (i) On the theory of the State's relation to labour, 
 — The attitude of most governments to the organised 
 socialism is naturally unfriendly; but the accepted 
 views of the relation of the State to the working and 
 suffering classes has marvellously changed in recent 
 years. Whereas not many years ago the policy and 
 principles of government took little account of the 
 masses of the people, it is now a recognised duty of the 
 State to care for them. So complete has the transfor- 
 mation been, that it will soon require a considerable 
 knowledge of history to realise it, for the times when 
 the claims of the lower orders were ignored are already 
 beginning to pass out of the memory of the younger 
 and most active portion of the community. 
 
 (2) The relation of political economy to socialism. 
 — We have already referred to the influence of social 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 267 
 
 problems on the classical political economy of this 
 country. The development of J. S. Mill's economic 
 views from loyal adherence to Ricardo, on to a reason- 
 able socialism cannot be regarded as representative, 
 seeing that he has so entirely outstripped his scholars. 
 In recent important works on Economics we see indeed 
 only a moderate recognition of the new influences, 
 but they do not command the assent of the public 
 as formerly, the result being that English Political 
 Economy remains in a most unsettled problematical 
 and unsatisfactory condition. 
 
 Here again Germany leads the way. The socialism of 
 the chair is not to any large extent really socialistic. But 
 it includes among its representatives eminent professors 
 and other economists, who recognise the historical and 
 ethical sides of political economy, who go far in giving 
 labour problems their due place in the. treatment of 
 their subject, and who have made most important-conces- 
 sions to the socialistic criticism of the existing society and 
 the prevalent political economy. One of the most notable 
 of living German economists and sociologists Albert 
 Schaffle is more than historical ; his great work Bau 
 und, Leben des socialen korpers is a construction of 
 society from the evolution point of view. In the same 
 work he has even expressed his conviction that ' the 
 future belongs to the purified socialism,' though later 
 utterances make his attitude somewhat doubtful. 
 However that may be, he has brought to the study of 
 social problems a combination of learning, of philo- 
 sophic insight directed by the best light of his time, 
 and of sympathy inspired by the cause of the poor 
 
268 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 man, which is not equalled by any living economist. 
 No great living economist has been so powerfully 
 influenced by socialist speculation. 
 
 (3) The relation of the Christian Church to social- 
 ism. — It is a most serious mistake to suppose that there 
 can be any real antagonism between the ethical and 
 spiritual teaching of Christianity and the principles of 
 socialism rightly understood. The diflSculty is how to 
 reconcile the prevalent competitive system with any 
 reasonable conception of Christian ethics. We can now 
 see that Christianity was a strong assertion of the moral 
 and spiritual forces against the struggle for existence, 
 which had assumed such a hard, cruel, and vicious form 
 in ancient civilisation and in the Eoman world. The 
 Christian Church did much to soften and then to 
 abolish slavery and serfdom, into which the peoples 
 defeated in the struggle for existence had been forced. 
 A right comprehension of the Christian life and of the 
 spirit and tendency of Christian histoiy should show 
 that the Church should also use its influence against 
 the continuance of the struggle for existence in the 
 competitive system, and in favour of the less fortunate, 
 who in the course of that form of struggle have been 
 driven to precarious wage-labour as their only means of 
 livelihood. 
 
 Some of the prominent spokesmen of the Church 
 have seen clearly enough that the competitive system 
 is not consistent with Christian teaching. That there 
 have been so few such is a striking and lamentable 
 proof of the little interest taken by the clergy in the 
 real and living questions of the time. As we have 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 269 
 
 already seen, Maurice and Kingsley denounced the Man- 
 chester school, started the Christian socialist movement 
 of 1848, and gave a very considerable impetus to co- 
 operation. 
 
 The participation of the Catholic Church of Germany 
 in the social question dates from the period of the 
 Lassalle agitation. In 1863 DoUinger recommended 
 that the Church should intervene in the movement, 
 and Bishop von Ketteler of Mainz lost no time in 
 expressing sympathy with Lassalle. In a treatise 
 entitled Die Arbeiterfrage U7td das Ohristenthwn (1864) 
 Ketteler criticised the liberalism of the Manchester 
 school in substantially the same terms as Lassalle, and 
 recommended the voluntary formation of productive 
 associations with capital supplied by the faithful. In 
 I §68 the Catholic socialism of Germany took -a more 
 pratical form : it started an organ of its own and began 
 to organise unions for the elevation of the working 
 men. The principles of the movement were with some 
 precision expounded by Canon Moufang in an electoral 
 address at Mainz in 1871, and by the writers in their 
 organ. 
 
 All agree in condemning the principles of liberal- 
 ism, especially in its economic aspects, as destructive 
 of society and pernicious to the working-man, who, 
 under thje pretence of freedom, is exposed to all the 
 precariousness and anarchy of competition and sacri- 
 ficed to the iron law of wages. Self-help as practised 
 in the Schulze-Delitzsch schemes is also considered to 
 be no sure way of- deliverance. The general remedy is 
 union on Catholic principles, especially the formation 
 
270 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 of trade guilds suited to modern exigences, which some 
 of their leaders would make a compulsory measure 
 enforced by the State. The views of Moufang, which 
 are most definite, may be thus summarised ; legal pro- 
 tection for the workers, especially as regards hours of 
 labour, wages, the labour of women and children, 
 sanitation; subventions for workmen's productive 
 associations ; lightening of taxes on labour ; control of 
 the moneyed and speculating interests. In the organ- 
 isation of unions the success of Catholic socialism has 
 been great ; and till recently the social- democrats made 
 no progress in Catholic districts. 
 
 The socialist activity of the Protestant Church of 
 Germany dates from 1878. The most important 
 literary product of the movement is a work by Pastor 
 Todt entitled Ber radiJcale deutsche Socialismus und die 
 christliche Gesellschaft. In this work Todt condemns 
 the economics of liberalism as unchristian, and seeks to 
 show that the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity 
 are entirely Scriptural, as are also the socialist demands 
 for the a.bolition of private property and of the wage 
 system, that the labourer should have the full produce 
 of his labour, and that labour should be associated. 
 The chief leader of the movement was the Court 
 preacher Stocker, the head also of the anti-Semitic 
 agitation, which is largely traceable to economic causes. 
 Stocker founded two associations — a central union for 
 social reform, consisting of members of the middle 
 classes interested in the emancipation of labour, and a 
 Christian social working-men's party. The former has 
 had considerable success, especially among the 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 271 
 
 Lutheran clergy. The movement met with the most 
 strenuous resistance from the social-democratic party 
 and was greatly hampered by the anti-social law of 
 1878. 
 
 In recent years all the sections of the Christian 
 Church in England have felt the influence of the 
 democratic movement, and have shown a commendable 
 interest in social questions. The most notable repre- 
 sentative of this new spirit was Cardinal Manning, 
 The Report on socialism made to the Pan- Anglican 
 Conference, which met at Lambeth in 1888, by the 
 committee appointed to deal with the question was also 
 a remarkable sign of the times. In a vague and 
 undecided way the Report accepted what should be 
 regarded as the main aim of socialism — ^the reunion of 
 capital and labour through the principle of association. 
 Without expressing an opinion on the Report, the 
 Conference commended it to the consideration of the 
 people. 
 
 (4) It is needless to speak o£ the great revolution in 
 current opinion regarding labour, as reflected in the press 
 and in contemporary literature. All is changed since 
 the time when Carlyle and Ruskin lifted up their 
 voices in the wilderness to an unbelieving generation ! 
 
 (5) Nor is it necessary to say anything of the greatest 
 change of all, which has taken place in the opinions and 
 feelings of the masses of working men, who constitute 
 the modern democracy. Few men, however, really 
 understand the new power that has arisen in the 
 growing intelligence of the workers, in the discontent, 
 in the passion for improvement, in the hopes and 
 
272 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 aspirations whicli so deeply move them. It has not yet 
 found adequate expression, direction, and organisation : 
 but every year it is making fresh advance towards 
 clearness o£ aim. A main pai't of the significance of 
 Marx's activity lay in the fact that he strove to give 
 utterance and organisation to this vast and growing 
 mass of vague and half-conscious sentiment. In the 
 future we can btit hope that it will receive wise and 
 8alutary guidance. 
 
 So much may fairly be said regarding the influence 
 of socialistic speculation on the opinion of the civihsed 
 world. It must be admitted, however, that as yet the 
 change is maialy in the region of opinion. For in the 
 domain of practice the competitive system, in spite of 
 many modifications, still holds the field ; and the old 
 Political Economy, though greatly discredited, still finds 
 its strongest justification in the fact that it is a reason- 
 ably accurate analysis of an existing and working 
 system. When asked for any grounds that may be 
 brought forward for believing that the socialistic ideal 
 is becoming a reality, we can only point to symptoms 
 or tendencies, not to definite results on a scale com- 
 mensurate with the development of modern industry. 
 
 Yet these tendencies are large, most significant, and 
 visibly increasing. ' The following are the main lines 
 along which they may be observed. 
 
 (i) The State, which by reasonable socialism should 
 be regarded as the association of men on a large scale, 
 and as such should continue to have a most important 
 function. 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 373 
 
 (2) The Municipality, or Oommune, which, notwith- 
 standing certain objections, is the more convenient 
 word, as it includes the parish as well as the munici- 
 pality, and which should be regarded as the association 
 for local purposes. As every one knows how greatly 
 the range of State and municipal action for the common 
 good has been extended in recent yearSj we need not 
 enlarge on this aspect of our subject. But in what we 
 have to say it will be convenient to consider the State 
 and the local body together, as they are really comple- 
 ments of each other. In a well-ordered community 
 there should be no real opposition between the two. 
 Under the conditions which now prevail there can be 
 no flourishing local life except in reasonable relation to 
 an efficient central organ ; and the central organ can 
 do its part wisely and effectively only by allowing 
 suitable scope to local energy. No absolute rules can 
 be laid down for the relations of the two to each other ; 
 these must be determined by considerations of time and 
 circumstances. But the problem of their opposition 
 under any rigime can be a difficulty only for unwise 
 statesmanship. 
 
 It may not be a new thing in theory, that the State 
 should be an association for the promotion of the 
 common interests of all its members, or that the com- 
 mune should be an association for the general good of 
 the inhabitants of a locality, but it is practically new. 
 It is only during the last generation that the people 
 who form the majority of every society have received 
 any reasonable consideration from the organs of the 
 State. We have during the last fifty years seen a tardy 
 
 18 
 
374 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 reversal of tte old injustice in our own country, and for 
 some years the movement towards improvement has 
 been growing apace. But our leading statesmen seem 
 even yet to be reluctant or only half willing to advance. 
 The domestic history of recent times is the record of 
 concessions made, not because the leaders of either of 
 our great parties particularly approved of them, bat 
 because they were demanded by large sections of voters. 
 In fact the initiative in legislation has now passed 
 from the statesmen to the democracy, and our leaders 
 await the dictation of the people. It is an instructive 
 and pathetic, but not too dignified, spectacle, that poli- 
 ticians trained in the theory and practice of laissez-faire 
 should without open confession of a change of principle 
 thus do the bidding of the social-democracy ! 
 
 The statesmen of Germany have been more consis- 
 tent ; for when they inaugurated their schemes of State 
 socialism they frankly proclaimed their adhesion to its 
 principles. In this they were encouraged by the old 
 law of Prussia, which recognised the duty of the State 
 to provide subsistence for those who could not make a 
 living, and labour for those who were out of employ- 
 ment. The position of the Prussian kingdom has 
 always been such that it required to foster the full 
 strength of the State by all available means, and there- 
 fore could not afford to neglect any considerable portion 
 of its population. In his State socialism therefore, 
 Bismarck could appeal with some show of reason to the 
 traditional policy of Prussia. But it was really a new 
 departure. 
 
 Its leading principles were announced in an Im- 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 275 
 
 perial message to the Eeichstag on the 17th of 
 November i88r. Besides the repressive measures 
 necessary to restrain the excesses of the social-democracy, 
 the Emperor declared that the healing of social evils 
 was to be sought in positive measures for the good of 
 the working man. The measures proposed were for the 
 insurance of the workmen against accident, sickness, 
 old age, and inability to work, by arrangements under 
 State control. 'The finding of the right ways and 
 means for this State protection of the working man is a 
 difficult task, but also one of the highest duties that 
 concern every society standing on the ethical founda- 
 tions of the Christian national life.' The aged Emperor 
 next went on to say that he would look back with 
 greater satisfaction on the successes with which Pro- 
 vidence had visibly blessed his reign, if he could 
 bequeath to the Fatherland new and lasting pledges of 
 peace at home, and to the needy greater security and 
 larger means for rendering the help to which they had 
 a claim. The message also spoke of ' organising the 
 life of the people in the form of corporative associa- 
 tions under the protection and furtherance of the State, 
 to render possible the solution of problems which the 
 central power alone cannot undertake.' The Imperial 
 programme has now been realised. It is still too early 
 to discuss what its permanent results are likely to be. 
 The help provided by its various measures is scanty 
 enough, but no one can reasonably doubt that it is im- 
 measurably superior to our English Poor Law. 
 
 (3) The co-operative society or association for the 
 ordinary purposes of industry. — Co-operation has 
 
276 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 hitherto made comparatively little progress in produc- 
 tion, but when we consider the low point from which 
 the movement started, only about fifty years ago, and 
 how painfully capital, experience and skill had to be 
 acquired by the poor workers we should rather be sur- 
 prised at the advance that has been made in England, 
 Germany, Italy and other progressive countries. It 
 is only a partial realisation of the socialistic ideal, but 
 it is well-founded, solid and most promising. 
 
 In England a co-operative society is usually a group 
 of workers who manage distribution with their joint 
 capital in their own interests. The group is entirely 
 democratic, open to every one, organised on the principle 
 of one man, one vote, and choosing their own committee 
 or executive ; the manager is a social functionary ; no 
 member can legally hold more than ;£'2O0 of capital in 
 any society. Production for domestic consumption is 
 now also making very considerable progress. As the 
 societies number about 1,200,000 members and provide 
 for the consumption of one-sixth of the population, the 
 co-operative movement in Great Britain is already an 
 industrial and economic power of no mean order. If it 
 has not solved the social question, it has at least done 
 much to clear the way towards a solution. The move- 
 ment is also making rapid progress in Germany, Austria, 
 Italy and Denmark, and its greatest successes are in 
 other fields than distribution. 
 
 The co-operative society, therefore, is a self-governing 
 group of workers, which has -already made very con- 
 siderable progress in controlling the economic interests 
 of the labouring class. Not a little disappointment is 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 277 
 
 felt that it has not accomplished greater results ; as we 
 believe, without good ground. It might reasonably 
 have been expected that human nature would survive 
 among co-operators, and that the self-regarding prin- 
 ciple would continue to be the main-spring of individual 
 action. Better social arrangements can only provide 
 for it a more efficient system of regulation. 
 
 It is particularly regrettable that co-operative societies 
 have not always had sufficient regard for their employees. 
 There can be little doubt that the contrast between 
 producers and consumers, and between the centralising 
 and de-centralisiug tendencies in organisation will long 
 be a difficulty among co-operators, who do not thoroughly 
 understand the new system to which they belong. Yet 
 it should also be said that many of the objections raised 
 by the critics of the movement are really due to the fact 
 that they do not understand its real nature, and imagine 
 that they find old things where really they meet only 
 old names. 
 
 (4) Of all the recent movements for the better ordering 
 of society in England, we believe the co-operative move- 
 ment to be the most hopeful, because the most thorough 
 and practical, but it is only one of many. During the 
 last half-century we have seen a long succession of 
 efforts, partially successful, towards a new organisation 
 of society rendered necessary by the changes due to the 
 industrial revolution. In all spheres the watchword of 
 the new era has been freedom, the removal of restraint. 
 But it has beea found that positive measures of recon- 
 struction were also necessary. Factory legislation 
 carried in opposition to the prevailing economic theory, 
 
278 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 trades unions, employers' combinations, industrial part- 
 nerships, boards of conciliation, the co-operative sys- 
 tem, — all these are real, if partial, endeavours towards 
 a new organisation of society suited to the new con- 
 ditions. They are all modifications and limitations 
 imposed on the competitive system, and to them the 
 progress of the last fifty years is largely due. Socialism 
 claims to be the comprehensive scheme of organisation 
 which embraces in a complete and consistent unity all 
 these partial efforts. 
 
 (5) But the most striking feature of recent economic 
 history is the continuation of the movement which 
 began with the industrial revolution. Through this 
 process the small producer was superseded by the 
 capitalist, the snialler capitalist by the larger. And 
 now the single capitalist is being absorbed by the com- 
 pany, an increasing proportion of the world's business 
 being so vast that only a great company can provide the 
 requisite capital and organisation ; whilst in the large 
 companies, in case they cannot drive each other out of 
 the field there is a marked tendency to bring about a 
 fusion of interests. In all this we see a great construc- 
 tive process going on as the result of the inherent laws 
 of industrial development. The movement is active in 
 our own country ; but it is far surpassed in magnitude 
 and activity by similar phenomena in the United States 
 of America, where it is favoured by special circumstances. 
 Under the protective system the economic development 
 of America proceeds undisburbed by the industrial 
 power of England. It is a self-contained and self- 
 sufficing continent with a vast area and enormous 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 379 
 
 natural resources. The people have not such a wide 
 variety of political, social literary and artistic interests 
 as have the ruling classes of England, and have there- 
 fore been all the more keenly engaged in the exploita- 
 tion of the new world that lay open to them. Capitalism 
 in America has shown an energy, acuteness and fertility 
 of resource, which even in England is unparalleled. But 
 in the various departments of industry the chief? have 
 found that competition may be suicidal and mutually 
 destructive, and have therefore seen it expedient to 
 arrange with each other for the regulation of production, 
 of prices and wages. Hence the trusts, or great com- 
 binations of capitalists, which now confront American 
 society and the American Republic, and which as the 
 latest development of capitalism are well calculated to 
 excite scientific curiosity in every country. 
 
 Thus far have we come through the natural 
 growth of the company. If we consider the nature 
 and development of the company, we shall find 
 that it is not entirely undemocratic. The directors 
 are, in principle at least, elected and removable 
 by the shareholders. And as the shares are open 
 for purchase by any one, a porter may be a share- 
 holder in the railway company of which he is a 
 servant, with, so far, a voice in the management. But 
 in point of fact the companies are owned and controlled by 
 the capitalist classes, and are a development of capital- 
 ism. The directors are usually large capitalists. Their 
 main aim is to produce dividends. The relation of the 
 management to the employees cannot have much of a 
 kindly human and personal element. 
 
28o THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 On the other hand the development of the company in 
 a large degree means that the real administration of the 
 economic movement is passing out of the hands of the 
 owner of capital as such. "The companies are for the 
 most part managed by paid ofEcials, who may or may 
 not have a substantial holding in the capital. That 
 is, the capitalists do not really manage the companies 
 in which their capital is embarked. The manager, 
 with a staff of paid officials, has become the pivot 
 of the industrial movement. Generally speaking, 
 the large company is more amenable to social regula- 
 tion than a variety of small enterprises. And now 
 we see that the natural development of the company 
 has prepared the whole organisation necessary for its 
 complete transference to social ownership and control, 
 if such a step were deemed advisable. A great railway 
 or system of water supply can be transferred to State 
 or municipal control without any particular change in 
 the organisation by which it is worked. In fact, capital- 
 ism has prepared or is preparing the mechanism 
 by which it may be superseded. It has done its work 
 so thoroughly, that it has been rendering- even itself 
 superfluous. We need not add that preparatory steps 
 towards the transformation of the company may also 
 be seen in the spread of the principle of industrial 
 partnerships or profit-sharing. 
 
 . (6) But the greatest force in the social evolution of 
 the present time consists of the human beings who are 
 most directly interested in it — the modern democracy. 
 This democracy is marked by a combination of 
 characteristics which are new to history. It is being 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 281 
 
 educated and enlightened in the school and by the 
 cheap press ; it is being drilled and organised in large 
 factories, in the national armies, by vast popular de- 
 monstrations, in the gigantic electoral struggles of the 
 time. Thus it is becoming conscious of its enormous 
 power, and able to make use of it. It is becoming 
 conscious also of its unsatisfactory social and economic 
 position. The democracy which has grown to be the 
 master-force of the civilised world is still for the most 
 part economically a proletariat dependent on precarious 
 wage-labour. Having transformed the political condition 
 of things, they are ready now for an economic transfor- 
 mation. But the inevitable process of concentration of in- 
 dustrial operations already referred to is entirely against 
 the continuance or restoration of the small producer, 
 whether workman or peasant proprietor. Such efforts 
 of continuai^ce or restoration are reactionary : they are 
 economically tnsound and must fail. The economic 
 transformation must be sought in the application of 
 the principle of association to the large industry. 
 
 (7) We are thus brought to the conclusion that the 
 competitive system, with precarious wage-labour as the 
 lot of the vast majority of the people, is not a suitable 
 and adequate form for the social development of the 
 future. The competitive system has led to great 
 strikes, which have been the cause of wide- spread 
 misery, almost as grievous as the suffering endured 
 during the worst campaigns under the old style of war- 
 fare. It has led to great commercial and industrial 
 crises, which have scattered over the civilised world 
 panic and ruin, followed by long-continued stagnation 
 
282 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 and depression. Thus anarchy, waste and starvation 
 have been its too frequent attendants, while the normal 
 position of the workmen under it has been precarious and 
 unworthy of free enlightened men. England has had 
 less reason than most countries to regret the prevalence 
 of competition, for her industrial supremacy has 
 generally left her victor in the struggle, and she has 
 hitherto looked forward to widening markets as the 
 solution of her economic troubles. But recent experi- 
 ence may teach us that reason and law should control 
 industry and commerce as well as other spheres of 
 human activity. 
 
 In America, the development of the Trust system 
 is only another proof of the inadequacy of the com- 
 petitive system. The supporters of the Trusts main- 
 tain with very good show of reason that unregulated 
 competition is harmful and may be ruinous to all 
 concerned, and that they can maintain fair prices, pay 
 fair wages, and secure a fair return to capital only by 
 mutual arrangement among the producers. But the 
 system obviously involves the serious objection that the 
 great industrial chiefs who organise and direct the 
 trusts are thereby constituted supreme judges of their 
 own interests and of the economic interests of the 
 whole American people, that such combinations form a 
 huge monopoly in so many of the leading articles of 
 consumption, and establish an economic, social, and 
 political power, which may be a danger to American 
 society. In short we are driven to the result that 
 while competition has been hurtful or ruinous to those 
 engaged in it, the now prevailing system of regulation 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 283 
 
 by capitalism in its own interests is a serious danger to 
 the whole people. There is only one right way out of 
 such a dilemma. 
 
 (8) The success of socialism greatly depends on the 
 realisation of the two ideals, which may be regarded as 
 the main pillars of the theory, when applied to practice. 
 These are : — 
 
 (a) The normal working day : the general reduction 
 of the working day to eight hours in the immediate 
 future, and eventually to a shorter time. Such a 
 desirable change would be better accomplished by 
 voluntary agreement under the pressure of public 
 opinion than by legislation ; but it would be better 
 made by legislation than by the cruel and clumsy 
 method of strikes. 
 
 (6) A remuneration which will ensure a suitable 
 standard of living; in other words the means of a 
 normal development. A reasonable standard of living, 
 the competent means of a normal development have 
 been determined by science and are no longer a matter 
 of Utopian guess-work. A fairly definite measure of 
 fresh air, food, clothing, exercise, and of satisfaction 
 for the affections associated with wife and children 
 constitute the rational needs of the average man. This 
 is the moral and scientific basis of a rational system of 
 distribution. The competitive wage determined by the 
 iron law of wages of the older economists should be 
 superseded by a remuneration embodying this principle. 
 It is the Daily Bread of the Lord's Prayer as definable 
 by modern science. 
 
 The effect of the socialistic theory on these points is 
 
284 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 to remove two vital interests of man from the range of 
 competition, and to place them on an ethical and 
 scientific basis under social control. In so far as the 
 working day of the employees of government, munici- 
 palities, co-operative societies, companies and private 
 firms approximate to eight hours, in so far as the wage 
 paid by them secures to the workers a fit and reason- 
 able standard of living, in so far is the socialistic ideal 
 realised. Every one conversant with the history of the 
 last fifty years knows how vast an improvement has 
 been made in both respects. 
 
 In considering the question of the practicability of a 
 rational socialism, let us remember that it only proposes 
 to accomplish on a wider scale and for a more enlight- 
 ened time a task analogous to that undertaken by the 
 guilds for the mediaeval world. The guild was an 
 organisation for the promotion of the common interests 
 of the workers at a time when law and order were not 
 sufficiently established by strong central governments, 
 and when the present distinction between labourer and 
 capitalist had not declared itself. It was a fairly 
 equitable organisation of an industry, which was local 
 and associated with city life, and which worked with a 
 very limited and undeveloped technique. Socialism 
 proposes an equitable organisation of industry for the 
 modern world with its enormous mechanical development 
 and large industry, under a democracy guided by science 
 and professing allegiance to the highest moral ideals. 
 
 As conclusion to our review, then, we must believe 
 that, while the competitive system still holds the field, 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 285 
 
 we have very good grounds for thinking that it should 
 pass away, and is passing away. We have seen how, in 
 accordance with the fundamental principles of socialism, 
 the State is becoming, not in name only but in reality, 
 an association for the promotion of common national 
 interests, in so far as they can be well furthered by the 
 central organ ; and that the municipality or commune 
 is really beginning to perform the same functions for 
 local purposes. In the co-operative system, in the 
 growth of trades unions, of arbitration, boards of con- 
 ciliation, and similar forms of organisation, we see 
 partial efEorts towards a comprehensive system of social 
 control over the industrial processes. And the natural 
 development of the company is providing the mechanism 
 whereby it may also be placed under social manage- 
 ment. It is clear that along these lines the movement 
 may spread tOl it cover the whole field of our social- 
 economic life, and place the competitive spirit under an 
 effective and reasonable regulation. 
 
 Referring to questions which were raised in other 
 parts of this book, we believe that recent modifications 
 in the Iron Law of Wages, which have been alleged in 
 confutation of Lassalle's position, are really symptoms 
 of the decline of capitalism. Such modifications are 
 due to influences which are inconsistent with the con- 
 tinued predominance of capitalism. We believe also 
 that Marx made a serious mistake in holding that the 
 further development of capitalism will be marked by 
 the growing "wretchedness, oppression, slavery, degene- 
 racy, and exploitation " * of the working-class. Facts 
 * Kapital, p. 790. 
 
286 THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 
 
 and reasonable expectations combine clearly to indicate 
 that the democracy, on which the social evolution of the 
 future depends, is marked by a growing intellectual, 
 moral, and political capacity, and by an increasing free- 
 dom and prosperity ; and all these things make it only 
 more ardent and capable for further progress and for 
 the great tasks that lie before it. Social progress must 
 in the last resort depend on the character and capacity 
 of the human beings concerned in it. The democracy, 
 the representative and promoter of the new order, 
 shows a growing fitness for its world-historic mission. 
 
 The lesson taught by much recent experience and 
 the goal of many convergent tendencies seem un- 
 doubtedly to be, that society should control industry in 
 its own interests. An industry carried on by free 
 associated men would be in perfect accord with other 
 forms and methods of progress, ethical, political, and 
 economic. The purified socialism may be regarded as 
 the co-ordination and consummation of every other 
 form of human progress, inasmuch as it applies to the 
 use of man all the factors of scientific, mechanical, and 
 artistic development in harmony with the prevailing 
 political and ethical ideas. It is therefore a most 
 desirable form of organisation. And many large and 
 growing symptoms show that it is practicable. It is a 
 type of organisation, which may take shape in a thousand 
 diverse ways according to the differences in historic 
 conditions and in national temperament. Within its 
 limits there will be reasonable scope for individual 
 development and for every variety of liking and capa- 
 city consistent with the well-being of others ; but 
 
RECENT PROGRESS OF SOCIALISM 287 
 
 exceptional talent and the generous enthusiasm which 
 is its fitting accompaniment will more and more find 
 their proper field in the service of society, an ideal 
 which is already' largely realised in the democratic 
 state. 
 
 In a rational socialism we may therefore see a long 
 and widening avenue of progress, along which the 
 improvement of mankind may be continued in a peace- 
 ful and gradual, yet most hopeful, sure, and effective 
 way. Such a prospect offers the best remedy for the 
 apathy and frivolity, cynicism and pessimism, which 
 are now so prevalent. And it is the most effectual 
 counteractive to restlessness, discontent, and all the 
 evils and excesses of the revolutionary spirit. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 After the Revolution of 1830 the Saint-Simonists were 
 referred to in the French Chamber of Deputies as a sect who 
 advocated community of goods and of women. The follow- 
 ing communication in their defence was addressed to the 
 Chamber by Bazard and Enfantin, October i, 1830 : — 
 
 ' The Saint-Simonists undoubtedly do profess ideas on 
 the future of property and of women which are special to 
 themselves, and which are connected with views entirely 
 new and special on religion, authority, liberty — in short, on 
 all the great problems which are now being agitated over 
 the whole of Europe with so much disorder and violence ; 
 but these ideas are very different from the opinions which 
 men attribute to them. 
 
 ' The system of community of goods is always understood 
 to mean equal division among all the members of society, 
 either of the means of production or of the fruit of the 
 labour of all. 
 
 'The Saint-Simonists reject this equal division of pro- 
 perty, which in their eyes would constitute a greater 
 violence, a more revolting injustice, than the unequal divi- 
 sion, which was originally eflfected by force of arms, by 
 conquest. 
 
 ' For they believe in the natural inequality of men, and 
 
APPENDIX 289 
 
 regard this inequality as the very basis of association, as the 
 indispensable condition of social order. 
 
 ' They reject the system of community of goods, for this 
 would be a manifest violation of the first of all the moral 
 laws, which it is their mission to teach, and which enjoins 
 that in the future each man should be placed according to 
 his capacity, and rewarded according to his work. 
 
 ' But in virtue of this law they demand the abolition of all 
 the privileges of birth without exception, and consequently 
 the destruction of the right of inheritance, the greatest of 
 those privileges, which at present comprehends them all, and 
 of which the effect is to leave to chance the distribution of 
 social privileges amongst the small number of those who 
 can lay claim to them, and to condemn the most numerous 
 class to depravation, ignorance, and misery. 
 
 ' They demand that all the instruments of labour, land 
 and capital, which at present form the divided stock of 
 private .proprietors, should be exploited by associations 
 with a suitable gradation of functions, so that the task 
 of each may be the expression of his capacity, and his 
 riches the measure of his services. 
 
 'The Saint-Simonists do not attack the institution of 
 private property, except in so far as it consecrates for some 
 the impious privilege of idleness — that is to say, of living 
 on the labour of others, except as it leaves to the accident 
 of birth the social status of individuals. 
 
 'Christianity has delivered women from slavery, but it 
 has nevertheless condemned them to an inferior position, 
 and in Christian Europe we still see them everywhere 
 deprived of religious, political, and civil rights. 
 
 'The Saint-Simonists announce their final liberation, 
 their complete emancipation, but they do not aim at 
 abolishing the sacred law of marriage proclaimed by 
 
 19 
 
290 APPENDIX 
 
 Christianity; on the contrary, they desire to fulfil this 
 law, to give it a new sanction, to add to the authority and 
 inviolability of the union which it consecrates. 
 
 ' Like Christians, they demand that a single man be 
 united to a single woman ; but they teach that the wife 
 should become the equal of the husband, and that according 
 to the special grace with which God has endowed her sex, 
 she should be associated in the exercise of the triple 
 function of religion, the State, and the family, so that 
 the social individual, which hitherto has been the man 
 only, may henceforward be man and woman. 
 
 ' The religion of Saint- Simon seeks only to abolish the 
 shameful traffic, the legal prostitution, which, under the 
 name of marriage, at present so frequently consecrates the 
 unnatural union of self-sacrifice and egotism, of intelligence 
 and ignorance, of youth and decrepitude.' 
 
 ' Such are the most general ideas of the Saint-Simonists 
 on the changes which they demand in the arrangements of 
 property and in the social condition of women.' 
 
 PROGEAMME OF THE SOCIALISTIC "WOEKING MEN'S 
 
 PARTY OF GEEMANY 
 
 GoTHA, May 1875 
 
 I. Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture, and 
 
 as useful work in general is possible only through society, 
 
 so to society, that is to all its members, the entire product 
 
 belongs ; while as the obligation to labour is universal, all 
 
 have an equal right to such product, each one according to 
 
 his reasonable needs. 
 
 In the existing society the instruments of labour are a 
 monopoly of the capitalist class ; the subjection of the work- 
 ing class thus arising is the cause of misery and servitude 
 in every form. 
 
APPENDIX 291 
 
 The emancipation of the working class demands the 
 transformation of the instruments of labour into the com- 
 mon property of society and the co-operative control of the 
 total labour, with application of the product of labour to 
 the common good, and just distribution of the same. 
 
 The emancipation of labour must be the work of the 
 labouring class, in contrast to which all other classes are 
 only a reactionary mass. 
 
 II. Proceeding from these principles, the socialistic work- 
 ing men's party of Germany aims by all legal means at the 
 establishment of the free state, and the socialistic society, to 
 destroy the iron law of wages by abolishing the system of 
 wage-labour, to put an end to exploitation in every form, 
 to remove all social and political inequality. 
 
 The socialistic working men's party of Germany, though 
 acting first of all within the national limits, is conscious 
 of the international character of the labour movement, and 
 resolved to fulfil all the duties which this imposes on the 
 workmen, in order to realise the universal brotherhood of 
 
 In order to prepare the way for the solution of the social 
 question, the socialistic working men's party of Germany 
 demands the establishment of socialistic productive associa- 
 tions with State help under the democratic control of the 
 labouring people. The productive associations are to be 
 founded on such a scale both for industry and agriculture 
 that out of them may develop the socialistic organisation 
 of the total labour. 
 
 The socialistic working men's party of Germany demands 
 as the basis of the State : — 
 
 I. Universal, equal, and direct right of electing and 
 voting, with secret and obligatory voting, of all citizens 
 
292 APPENDIX 
 
 from twenty years of age, for all elections and deliberations 
 in the State and local bodies. The day of election or 
 voting must be a Sunday or holiday. 
 
 II. Direct legislation by the people. Questions of war 
 and peace to be decided by the people. 
 
 III. Universal military duty. A people's army in place 
 of the standing armies. 
 
 IV. Abolition of all exceptional laws, especially as re- 
 gards the press, unions, and meetings, and generally of all 
 laws which restrict freedom of thought and inquiry. 
 
 V. Administration of justice by the people. Free jus- 
 tice. 
 
 YI. Universal and equal education by the State. Com- 
 pulsory education. Free education in all public places of 
 instruction. Religion declared to be a private concern. 
 
 The socialistic working men's party demands within the 
 existing society : 
 
 (i) Greatest possible extension of political rights and 
 liberties in the sense of the above demands. 
 
 (2) A single progressive income-tax for State and com- 
 mune, instead of the existing taxes, and especially of the 
 indirect taxes that oppress the people. 
 
 (3) Unrestricted right of combination. 
 
 (4) A normal working-day corresponding to the needs of 
 society. Prohibition of Sunday labour. 
 
 (5) Prohibition of labour of children, and of all women's 
 labour that is injurious to health and morality. 
 
 (6) Laws for the protection of the life and health of 
 workmen. Sanitary control of workmen's dwellings. In- 
 spection of mines, of factories, workshops, and home indus- 
 tries by officials chosen by the workmen. An effective 
 Employers' Liability Act. 
 
 (7) Regulation of prison labour. 
 
APPENDIX 293 
 
 (8) "Workmen's funds to be under the entire control of • 
 the workmen. 
 
 PROGRAMME OF THE KNIGHTS OF LABOUR OF AMERICA 
 
 i88s 
 
 I. To make industrial and moral worth, not wealth, the 
 true standard of individual and national greatness, 
 
 II. To secure to the workers the full enjoyment of the 
 wealth they create ; sufl5.cient leisure in which to develop 
 their intellectual, moral and social faculties ; all the bene- 
 fits, recreation, and pleasures of association ; in a word, 
 to enable them to share in the gains and honours of ad- 
 vancing civilisation. 
 
 In order to secure these results, we demand of the 
 State : 
 
 III. The establishment of Bureaus of Labour Statistics, 
 that we may arrive at a correct knowledge of the educa- 
 tional, moral, and financial condition of the labouring 
 masses. 
 
 IV. That the public lands, the heritage of the people, 
 be reserved for actual settlers ; not another acre for rail- 
 roads or speculators; and that all lands now held for 
 speculative purposes be taxed to their full value. 
 
 VI. The abrogation of all laws that do not bear equally 
 upon capital and labour, and the removal of unjust techni- 
 calities, delays, and discriminations in the administration of 
 
 justice. 
 
 VI. The adoption of measures providing for the health 
 and safety of those engaged in mining, manufacturing, and 
 building industries ; and for indemnification to. those en- 
 gaged therein for injuries received through lack of neces- 
 sary safeguards. 
 
294 APPENDIX 
 
 VII. The recognition by incorporation of trades unions, 
 orders, and such other associations as may be organised by 
 the working masses to improve their condition and protect 
 their rights. 
 
 VIII. The enactment of laws to compel corporations to 
 pay their employes weekly, in lawful money, for the labour 
 of the preceding week, and giving mechanics and labourers 
 a first lien upon the product of their labour to the extent 
 of their full wages. 
 
 IX. The abolition of the contract system on national. 
 State, and municipal works. 
 
 X. The enactment of laws providing for arbitration be- 
 tween employers and employed, and to enforce the decision 
 of the arbitrators. 
 
 XI. The prohibition by law of the employment of 
 children under fifteen years of age in workshops, mines, 
 and factories. 
 
 XII. To prohibit the hiring out of convict labour. 
 
 XIII. That a graduated income tax be levied. 
 And we demand at the hands of the Congress : 
 
 XIV. The establishment of a National monetary system, 
 in which a circulating medium in necessary quantity shall 
 issue direct to the people, without the intervention of 
 banks ; that all the National issue shall be full legal tender 
 in payment of all debts, public and private; and that the 
 Government shall not guarantee or recognise any private 
 banks, or create any banking corporations. 
 
 XV. That interest-bearing 'bonds, bills of credit or notes 
 shall never be issued by the Government, but that, when 
 need arises, the emergency shall be met by issue of legal 
 tender, non-interest-bearing money. 
 
 XVI. That the importation of foreign labour under con- 
 tract be prohibited. 
 
APPENDIX 295 
 
 XVII. That in connection with the post-office, the 
 Government shall organise financial exchanges, safe deposits 
 and facilities for deposit of the savings of the people in 
 small sums. 
 
 XVIII. That the Government shall obtain possession, 
 by purchase, under the rights of eminent domain, of all 
 telegraphs, telephones and railroads, and that hereafter no 
 charter or licence be issued to any corporation for construc- 
 tion or operation of any means of transporting intelligence, 
 passengers or freight. 
 
 And while making the foregoing demands upon the State 
 and National Government, we will endeavour to associate 
 our own labours : 
 
 XIX. To establish co-operative institutions such as will 
 tend to supersede the wage system, by the introduction of 
 a co-operative industrial system. 
 
 XX. To secure for both sexes equal pay for equal work. 
 
 XXI. To shorten the hours of labour by a general re- 
 fusal to work for more than eight hours. 
 
 XXII. To persuade employers to agree to arbitrate all 
 differences which may arise between them and their 
 employes, in order that the bonds of sympathy between 
 them may be strengthened and that strikes may be rendered 
 unnecessary. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Alexander II., great hopes at his accession, 200; rise of the 
 Eevolutionary party during his reign, 201 ; assassination, 209. 
 
 Alexander III., and the Eevolutionary party, 214. 
 
 Allen, AV., 59. 
 
 Altruism, 8. 
 
 Anarchism, first taught by Proudhon, 53 ; the Marx school and the 
 Anarchist, 141 ; its relation to the International, 176, 177 ; 
 MichaelBakunin, its great apostle, 183; set forth by Eakunin, 
 186, 187; and at the trial at Lyons, 189-191 ; summed up and 
 criticised, 191 ; a leading form of socialism in Eussia, 195-215 ; 
 in Spain, 178 ; France, Italy, 189, 263. 
 
 Anarchy, socialism wrongly identified with, 4. 
 
 Art, as related to socialism, 8, 246. 
 
 Association of all classes of all nations founded by Owen, i. 
 
 Association, productive, with State help, 103, 104, 113. 
 
 Babbui', his communism, 15. 
 
 Bakunin, Michael, at Paris, 39; activity in the International, 176, 
 
 184 ; his life, 183 ; opinions, 186 ; his influence in Eussia, 195. 
 Bazard, 23, 24.~ 
 Bebel, 254, 262. 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 59. 
 Bismarck, his work in German history, 75 ; his historic insight, 89 ; 
 
 his relation to the German social democracy, 258 ; his State 
 
 socialism, 274. 
 Blanc, Louis, his method of remuneration, 7 ; his activity during 
 
 the Eevolution of 1848, 39 ; life and theories, 40 ; points of 
 
 agreement with LassaUe, 216, 217. 
 Bourgeoisie, the middle or capitalist class, 38, 92, 130 &c., 159, 160, 
 
 161 ; its position in Eussia, 199, 210, 
 
INDEX 297 
 
 Capital, aim of socialism with regard to it, s, 6, 7, &c. ; contrast 
 between labour and capital, 22 ; individual capital, an institu- 
 tion in Fourier's system, 34, 36 ; how regarded by L. Blanc, 
 43 ; by Proudhon, 53 ; how obtained by the productive asso- 
 ciations of Lassalle, 103 ; a historic category, 108 ; word 
 wrongly used by socialists, 109 ; exposition of capital by Marx, 
 129, &o. ; its international relation to labour, 157, &o. ; its 
 place in anarchism, 187, 191 ; its place in a reasonable 
 socialism, 230, &c. 
 
 Capitalism, correct name for the prevalent economic order as con- 
 trolled by capitalists, 109, 133, 136. 
 
 Catholic Church, its societies and their property, 13 ; how related 
 to Saint-Simon, 22, 26 ; its social activity, 269. 
 
 Chartism, its import, 39, 67. 
 
 Christianity, relation to socialism, 7, 268. 
 
 Christian socialism, in England, 67 ; in Germany, 269, 270. 
 
 Collectivism, economic basis of the prevalent socialism, 9 ; its place 
 in L. Blanc's system, 43 ; goal of Lassalle's scheme, 105 ; 
 economic basis of anarchism, 192, 193. 
 
 Commune, the, its place in Fourier's system, 28 ; at Paris, 174, 175 ; 
 its place in anarchism, 188, 216.' 
 
 Communism, its relation to socialism, 13, 14, ij, 62. 
 
 Conjunctures, Lassalle's theory of, 106, 1 10. 
 
 Co-operative movement, really founded by Owen, 66 ; promoted by 
 Christian socialists in England, 68 ; movement in Germany and 
 its relation to Lassalle, 79, 100, loi, no ; commended by the 
 International, 166, 170, 171 ; its recent progress, 275. 
 
 Daewin, relation of Ms doctrine of development to economics, 
 224 ; relation of his teaching to that of Marx, 236 ; relation of 
 his theory to socialism, 237, &c. 
 
 Democracy, socialism its economic complement, 8 ; one of the 
 conditions necessary for the growth of socialism, 14 ; the 
 political basis of L. Blanc's schemes, 40, &c. ; development of, 
 43 ; democracy of workers, 94, 114 ; how trained for its great 
 task, 139, 150; its importance, 224, 227, 230, 250; its place in 
 social evolution, 280, 286. 
 
 Distribution, problem of, how solved in various schools of socialism, 
 6 ; such methods criticised, 233 ; moral and scientific basis 
 of, 283. 
 
 Donniges, Fraulein von, 86, 87. 
 
298 INDEX 
 
 Enfantin, 23, 24, 26. 
 
 Engels, Fi'. 69 ; his position and relation to Marx, 124, 125; his 
 exposition of the function of the State, 141. 
 
 Feudalism, in relation to socialism, 8, 16, 21 ; its overthrow by the 
 capitalist class, 92, 133 ; not a stereotyped system, 221 ; evolved 
 by the struggle for existence, 240. 
 
 Fourier, method of remuneration, 6 ; admitted private capital, 10 ; 
 a founder of socialism, 12 ; grew up under the immediate in- 
 fluence of the French Revolution, 15 ; life and opinions, 28 I 
 contrast to Saint-Simon and the centralising socialism, 28, 216, 
 217 ; his safeguards for individual and local freedom, 232. 
 
 Hegel, influence on Lassalle, 70 ; on Marx, 124, 142, 143, 150, 151 
 
 222 ; his doctrine of development, 224, 236. 
 Held, Adolf, definition of socialism, 3. 
 
 Individuality, under socialism, 9. 
 
 International, its aim, 4; Marx and the International, 153, 154; 
 history, 155 ; influence in it of Bakunin, 176, 184; trial at Lyons, 
 189 ; influence of it on the Russian revolutionary movement, 
 203. 
 
 Janet, Paul, definition of socialism, 3. 
 
 Kent, Duke of, 63. 
 Ketteler, Bishop, 84. 
 Kingsley, 68. 
 Kropotkine, Prince, 189, igo. 
 
 Laissez-paike, 2 ; economic optimism implied in it, 11 ; entirely 
 unsviitable to Prussia, 223 ; its adherents in England, 274. 
 
 Lassalle, at Paris, 39 ; on the power of lying, 46 ; his life, 69 ; his 
 theories, 90; his relations to Marx, 90; Rodbertus, 90, n8, 
 119 ; his influence on the Revolutionary party in Russia, 203 ; 
 points of agreement with L. Blanc, 216, 217 ; his presentation 
 of socialism, 222 ; exaggerated estimate of the influence of the 
 social principle, 248 ; position of the social-democratic party at 
 his death, 253 ; Bismarck's relation to him, 258 ; his iron law of 
 wages, 285. 
 
 Laveleye, definition of socialism, 3. 
 
 LavrofE, 189, 204. 
 
 League, Communist, 125 ; reorganised by Marx, 159 ; its manifesto, 
 160. 
 
INDEX 299 
 
 Leroux, Pierre, 23. 
 Liebknecht, W., 254. 
 Ludlow, 68. 
 
 Malthus, relation to Owen, 65 ; his theory and the population 
 question, 237 ; struggle for existence, 238. 
 
 Manchester theory of the State, 97. 
 
 Marx, Karl, his relation to the existing state, 4 ; his school the most 
 influential form of contemporary socialism, 12 ; Proudhon's 
 rigit of aubaine, compared with the theory of capital, 53 ; his 
 theory of surplus value enunciated by the Chartists, 67 ; com- 
 parison of his character with Lassalle's, 88 ; relation of his theory 
 of surplus value to Lassalle's iron law of wages, 98 ; collectivism 
 common to him with Lassalle and Rodbertus, 105 ; use of the 
 word capital, 109; life and theories, 124; criticism of his 
 theories, 143, 148 ,• compared with Adam Smith, 151 ; his .place 
 in history, 152; founding of the Communist League, 159; in- 
 fluence on the International, 165, &c. ; influence on the Eevo- 
 lutionary movement in Russia, 203 ; socialist movement should 
 not be identified with his views, 218 ; his abstractness, 222 ; 
 influence on the social-democratic movement in Germany, 254 ; 
 in England, 264 ; his view of the development, of the proletariat 
 criticised, 285. 
 
 MateriaJism, relation to socialism, 7 ; as held by Marx, 142, 149 ; as 
 held by Bakunin, 186 ; socialism purified from it, 228. 
 
 Maurice, 68. 
 
 Mazzini, 166, 184, 188. 
 
 Mill, J. S., his conception of socialism, 228. 
 
 Mir, the Russian form of the viUage-community, 195, 198 ; its analogy 
 to the community of Owen, the phalange of Fourier, and the 
 free commune of Bakunin, 216. 
 
 More, Thomas, 13. 
 
 Napoleon I., 156. 
 Napoleon III., 50, 53, 165. 
 New Christianity of Saint-Simon, 22. 
 New Harmony, 63. 
 New Lanark, 57. 
 Nicholas, Emperor, 60. 
 
 Nihilism, the correct name for the early stage of the Revolutionary 
 movement in Russia, 201, &p. 
 
300 INDEX 
 
 Oebiston, 63. 
 
 Owen, Robert, founder of the association of all classes of all nations, 
 I ; one of the historic founders of socialism, 2, 8, 12, 15 ; the 
 influences that conditioned his work, 16; life and theories, 55 ; 
 doctrine of surplus value held in his school, 128 ; influence on 
 Russian Revolutionary movement, 203 ; desire for a ready- made 
 socialism, 216. 
 
 Phalange, 28, 33, 216. 
 
 Plato, 13. 
 
 Progressist Party in Germany, 75, 78. 
 
 Proletariat, the class excluded from land and capital and dependent 
 on wage-labour, 5, 6 ; brought into active historic contrast to 
 the hourgeoisie, 38 ; its share in the risings at Paris, 1848, 47 ; 
 its position conditioned by the development of capitalism, 130 ; 
 and necessary to it, 132 ; its great r6le in the final dissolution 
 of capitalism, 137, &o. ; its emancipation the great aim of inter- 
 national socialism, 159; Marx, the scientific expounder of the 
 conditions of its existence and of its emancipation, 160, &c. ; 
 the Commune at Paris considered as a struggle for its deliver- 
 ance, 174 ; how existing in Russia, 204 ; the democracy still 
 mainly a proletariat, 281 ; Marx' theory of its future develop- 
 ment, 285. 
 
 Proudhon, one of the leaders of the socialism of 1848, 39; life and 
 theorieSj 48 ; theory of surplus value underlies his extra- 
 vagances, 128 ; the founder of anarchism, 53, 183 ; his 
 influence in the International, 169, 171 ; his exposition of 
 anarchism, 192, 193. 
 
 Ralahinb, 64. 
 
 Reybaud, i. 
 
 Rodbertus, his general conception of socialism, 10 ; relation to 
 Lassalle, go, 91 ; life and theories, 117 ; relation to Lassalleand 
 Marx, 122, 128, 129 ; too abstract and Prussian, 222. 
 
 Ronsdorf , speech of Lassalle at, 84. 
 
 Roscher, 2. 
 
 Rousseau, 15. 
 
 Saint-Simon, one of the historic founders of socialism, 2, 12 ; his 
 method of remuneration, 6 ; the influences that conditioned his 
 work, 15, 16, 17 ; his life and opinions, 19 ; represented the 
 principle of authority In the development of socialism, 222. 
 
INDEX 301 
 
 Schaffle, definition of socialism, g ; too abstract and Prussian in his 
 conception of socialism, 222 ; his high rank as an economist, 267. 
 
 Scheel, 3. 
 
 Schnlze-Delitzsch, his schemes, 79 ; Lassalle's treatment of him. 
 82 ; Lassalle's criticism of his schemes, loi ; the same exa- 
 mined, no, &o. 
 
 Schweitzer, 253, 255. 
 
 Smith, Adam, in relation to freedom, 14 ; compared with Marx,i5i ; 
 his principle of natural liberty, 221, 234. 
 
 Social democracy, its programme in Germany, 7 ; as taught by L. . 
 Blanc, 41 ; by LassaUe, 79, 94, &c. ; its progress in Germany, 
 
 253- 
 
 Social workshops of Louis Blanc, 42, 46. 
 
 State, in relation to socialism, 4 ; historic relation to property, 13 ; 
 its place in Saint-Simon, 28 ; in Louis Blano, 40 ; in LassaUe, 96, 
 &c. ; in Eodbertus, 121, 122 ; its rdle as explained by Fr. Engels, 
 141 ; Bakunin's relation to it, 186 ; two opposing tendencies 
 with regard to it in socialist movement, 216 ; its place in 
 socialism, 272, 285. 
 
 Stepniak's estimate of the numbers of the Russian Revolutionary 
 party, 214. 
 
 Surplus value, theory of, as held by Chartists, 67 ; as held by 
 Owenites, Rodbertus, Proudhon, &o., 128 ; its development by 
 Marx, 131, &c. ; criticism of Marx's theory of it, 143. 
 
 Times, The, and the International, 173. 
 
 Turgenief, his novel, Fathers and Sons, 202. 
 
 Tytherley, 64. 
 
 Tzardom, its great function in Russian history, 195, &c. ; still the 
 
 best available government, but not long tenable in its present 
 
 form, 210. 
 
 VoLTAiBB, 15. 
 
 Wages, iron law of, 80, 98, &c., 285. 
 
 Wagner, definition of socialism, 9 ; justly charged with abstract- 
 
 ness, 220. 
 William 1., Emperor, 75, 257; 274. 
 William II., Emperor, 181. 
 
PriHted dj> BA-LLA:^TVNB, HANSON AND CO. 
 Lo7tdon and Edinbitrgh' 
 
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