■ 
 
 
 
 I. 
 
 ■ 
 
 ( I 
 
 I 
 
 
 <- 
 
 
 . ■ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 ( 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 V 
 
SOCIALISM 
 
 ITS GROWTH AND 
 OUTCOME 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 AUTHOR OF “THE EARTHLY PARADISE,” “NEWS FROM NOWHERE,” ETC 
 
 AND 
 
 i 
 
 E. BELFORT BAX 
 
 AUTHOR OF “HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY,” “THE RELIGION OF 
 
 SOCIALISM,” ETC. 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASS, 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 CHARLES H KERR & COMPANY 
 
 1913 
 
> 
 
 JOHN F. HIGGINS 
 
 PRINTER AND BINDER 
 
 376-382 MONROE STREET 
 CHICAGO. ILLINOIS 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface ----------- 5 
 
 Introduction.- - - 7 
 
 I Ancient Society ------- 21 
 
 II The First Historical or Ancient Society - 31 
 
 III The Transition From the Classical to the 
 
 Mediaeval Period ------ 43 
 
 IV Mediaeval Society—Early Period - 52 
 
 V The Rough Side of the Middle Ages - 63 
 
 VI The End of the Middle Ages - 70 
 
 VII The Renaissance and the Reformation - 76 
 VIII Modern Society: Early Stages - 84 
 
 IX Preparations for Revolution—England - 91 
 X Preparations for Revolution—France - 98 
 
 XI The French Revolution: Constitutional 
 
 Stage - 107 
 
 XII The French Revolution: The Proletarian 
 
 Stage -------- 115 
 
 XIII The Industrial Revolution in England - - 124 
 
 XIV Political Movements in England - - 135 
 XV Reaction and Revolution on the Continent 145 
 
 XVI The Paris Commune of 1871, and the Conti¬ 
 nental Movement Following It - - 151 
 
 XVII The Utopists: Owen, Saint Simon, and 
 
 Fourier - -- -- -- - 158 
 
 XVIII The Transition From the Utopists to Mod¬ 
 ern Socialism ------- 167 
 
 XIX Scientific Socialism—Karl Marx - - 175 
 XX Socialism Militant ------ 203 
 
 XXI Socialism Triumphant ----- 217 
 

 ' 
 
 I 
 
 » 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 l? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 V..' 
 
 / ' • 
 
 / 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In offering this book to the public, we have to 
 say that we thought it useless to go over the 
 ground covered by so many treatises on Social¬ 
 ism, large and small, hostile and friendly, that 
 have appeared of late years. We have dealt 
 with our subject from the historical point of 
 view; this, we are aware, is a less exciting method 
 than the building of “practical” Utopias, or than 
 attempting the solution of political problems with¬ 
 in the immediate purview of the Socialist strug¬ 
 gle of to-day. On the other hand, a treatise 
 on abstract economics, furnished with a complete 
 apparatus of statistics, would have been more 
 congenial to another class of mind. Neverthe¬ 
 less, a continuous sketch of the development of 
 history in relation to Socialism, even as slight 
 as it is here, should have its value if efficiently 
 done. Our plan also necessarily deals with the 
 aspirations of Socialists now living, toward the 
 society of the future. 
 
 We have only further to add that the work has 
 been in the true sense of the word a collaboration, 
 each sentence having been carefully considered 
 by both the authors in common, although now 
 one, now the other, has had more to do with 
 initial suggestions in different portions of the 
 work. 
 
 w. M. 
 
 E. B. B. 
 
SOCIALISM 
 
 ITS GROWTH AND OUTCOME 
 
 \ 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 TN one of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales he recounts 
 how a little group of wrecked sea¬ 
 farers on a water-logged vessel, at the last ex¬ 
 tremity of starvation, are suddenly made delirious 
 with joy at seeing a sail approaching them. 
 As she came near them she seemed to be man¬ 
 aged strangely and unseamanly as though she 
 were scarcely steered at all, but come near she 
 did, and their joy was too great for them to 
 think much of this anomaly. At last they saw the 
 seamen on board of her, and noted one in the 
 bows especially who seemed to be looking at them 
 with great curiosity, nodding also as though 
 encouraging them to have patience, and smiling 
 at them constantly, showing while he did so 
 a set of very white teeth, and apparently so 
 anxious for their safety that he did not notice 
 that the red cap that he had on his head was 
 falling into the water. 
 
 All of a sudden, as the vessel neared them, and 
 while their hearts were leaping with joy at their 
 
 7 
 
8 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 now certain deliverance, an inconceivable 
 and horrible stench was wafted to them 
 across the waters, and presently to their 
 horror and misery they saw that this 
 was a ship of the dead, the bowing man 
 was a tottering corpse, his red cap a piece of 
 his flesh torn from him by a sea-fowl; his ami¬ 
 cable smile was caused by his jaws, denuded 
 of the flesh, showing his white teeth set in a 
 perpetual grin. So passed the ship of the dead 
 into the landless ocean, leaving the poor wretches 
 to their despair. 
 
 To us Socialists this Ship of the Dead is an 
 image of the civilization of our epoch, as the 
 cast-away mariners are of the hopes of the hu¬ 
 manity entangled in it. The cheerfully bowing 
 man, whose signs of encouragement and good¬ 
 feeling turn out to be the results of death and cor¬ 
 ruption, well betokens to us the much be-praised 
 philanthropy of the rich and refined classes of 
 our Society, which is born of the misery neces¬ 
 sary to their very existence. How do people 
 note eagerly, like Arthur Gordon Pym and his 
 luckless fellows, the beautiful hope of the soft¬ 
 ening of life by the cultivation of good feel¬ 
 ing, kindness, and gratitude between rich and 
 poor, with its external manifestations; its mis¬ 
 sionary enterprises at home and abroad—hos¬ 
 pitals, churches, refuges, and the like; its hard¬ 
 working clergy dwelling amidst the wretched 1 
 homes of those whose souls they are saving; its 
 elegant and enthusiastic ladies sometimes visiting 
 them; its dignified, cultivated gentlemen from 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 9 
 
 the universities spreading the influences of a 
 refined home in every dull half-starved parish in 
 England; the thoughtful series of lectures on 
 that virtue of thrift'which the poor can scarcely 
 fail to practice even unpreached to; its increas¬ 
 ing sense of the value of moral purity among 
 those whose surroundings forbid them to under¬ 
 stand even the meaning of physical purity; its 
 scent of indecency in Literature and Art, which 
 would prevent the publication of any book writ¬ 
 ten out of England or before the middle of the 
 19th century, and would reduce painting and 
 sculpture to the production of petticoated dolls 
 without bodies. All this, which seems so refined 
 and humane, is but the effect of the distant view 
 of the fleshless grinning skull of civilization seem¬ 
 ing to offer an escape to the helpless castaways, 
 but destined on its nearer approach to suffocate 
 them with the stench of its corruption, and then 
 to vanish aimlessly into the void, leaving them 
 weltering on the ocean of life which its false 
 hope has rendered more dreadful than before. 
 
 Let us then go through some of the forms 
 through which this universal hypocrisy of mod¬ 
 ern society, which is its special characteristic, 
 manifests itself. Our present family of blood 
 relationship, based on assumed absolute monog¬ 
 amy, recognizes feeble responsibility outside itself, 
 and professes to regulate the degrees of affection 
 to be felt between different persons according 
 to the amount of kinship between them, so that, 
 for instance, the brotherhood of blood would 
 almost extinguish the sense of duty in that other 
 
10 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 brotherhood of inclination or of mutual tastes and 
 pursuits, and in fact scarce admit that such ties 
 could be real. Or again, in cases when, as 
 sometimes happens, the sham blood family is 
 broken into by the adoption of a strange child, 
 the proceeding is cloaked by change of name, 
 assumption of mystery, and abundance of un¬ 
 conscious ceremonial; and all this time, though 
 doubtless there are plenty of examples of dis¬ 
 interested affection between the members of a 
 family, as between those outside of it, yet the 
 rule is, and our satirists are never tired of 
 playing on this string, that though to a certain 
 extent the bond of obligation is felt, it is burden¬ 
 some none the less, and is utterly powerless to 
 prevent the wrangling and hatred caused by the 
 clashing of the discordant dispositions of per¬ 
 sons doomed always to pose before the world 
 as special friends. Another point to be noticed 
 is the different way in which family bonds are 
 looked upon amidst different nations even in the 
 circle of modern Europe. In England it is true, 
 as we have said, that all virtue, honor, and 
 affection are supposed to be embraced within the 
 pale of the family; this superstition is by no 
 means so strong in France; nevertheless there is 
 a conventional bond there, apparently a survival 
 of the tyranny of the civil law of the Roman 
 Empire, that is much stronger than any family 
 tie in England. The family council is submitted 
 to by all Frenchmen and Frenchwomen as a 
 piece of unwriten law which is inexpugnable: 
 a Frenchman cannot marry without leave of his 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 11 
 
 parents before the age of twenty-five; the rela¬ 
 tionship of mother and child, which with all 
 exaggerations is more or less natural in England, 
 is almost sacerdotal in France, and is illuminated 
 by a curious kind of conventional sentiment in 
 literature, which sometimes fairly degrades for 
 the time even the greatest authors into the rank 
 of twaddlers. We do not say that a certain 
 amount of sentiment bred by the family system is 
 not genuine: it is reasonable to feel tenderness 
 for the persons who have taken the pains and 
 trouble of cherishing us in our helplessness, and 
 to wish to pay them back with some little kindness 
 when we no longer need that care, even when 
 time has shown us to have no special sympathy 
 for them: not unreasonable too to look with some 
 special sentiment on brothers and sisters, even 
 when manhood has drifted them away from our 
 lives and their aspirations, since in years past 
 we were living with them in such familiarity 
 when they and we were innocent and undevel¬ 
 oped. But what relation does this light and 
 easy yoke of sentiment bear to the iron chain 
 of conventional sham duty which all of us, even 
 the boldest, are oppressed by so sorely: a chain 
 too that is broken amidst various circumstances 
 of real and conventional disgrace whenever neces¬ 
 sity, as to-day understood, that is, commercial 
 necessity, compels it? In short, the family pro¬ 
 fesses to exist as affording us a haven of calm 
 and restful affection and the humanizing influ¬ 
 ences of mutual help and consideration, but it 
 ignores quietly its real reason for existence, its 
 
12 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 real aim, namely, protection for individualist 
 property by means of inheritance, and a nucleus 
 for resistance to the outside world, whether that 
 take the fo'*n of other families or the public 
 weal, such as it may be. 
 
 But this shows after all but the best side of 
 the modern conventional family, as it works in 
 the middle classes. In the lower classes, where 
 the family of blood-relationship might afford 
 some real protection and help to its members, 
 it is completely broken up by the action of the 
 factory system, under which father, mother, 
 brothers, sisters, husband, and wife, compete 
 against each other in the labor market, the end 
 of which is to provide a profit for the capi¬ 
 talist employer; and this “family,” which as now 
 constituted exists for middle-class needs, being 
 useless to the working-classes, they have noth¬ 
 ing to turn to to supply the lack of a true social 
 unit. 
 
 To most men it will be more obvious that 
 similar charges may be brought against the re¬ 
 ligion of modern society: most intelligent persons 
 will allow that it means nothing more than mere 
 sets of names and formulas, to one or other of 
 which every reputable man is supposed to be 
 attached; in one or other of which he will be 
 sure to find a conventional solution of the great 
 problem of the universe, including our life and 
 its aspirations. If he fails in his duty to society 
 in this respect he suffers accordingly; and indeed 
 few men of any position are bold enough to avow 
 that they are outside all such systems of eccle- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 13 
 
 siasticism; the very unorthodox must belong to 
 some acknowledged party—they must be ortho¬ 
 dox in their unorthodoxy. But as a fact the 
 greater part of cultivated men dare nTfcgo so far 
 as that, and are contented with letting ^society in 
 general feel happy in believing that they subscribe 
 to the general grimace of religion that has taken 
 the place of the real belief, not as yet become a 
 superstition, which allowed practice to be deduced 
 from its solid dream. 
 
 Meanwhile it is common, and especially in 
 the more reactionary circles, to find men who pri¬ 
 vately admit a cynicism that to their minds re¬ 
 lieves them from any ethical responsibility, while 
 in public they keep up the farce of supporting 
 a religion that at least professes to have an ethic 
 of its own. 
 
 Yet even now it is necessary that a certain 
 code of morality should be supposed to exist and 
 to have some relation to the religion which, being 
 the creation of another age, has now become a 
 sham. With this sham moreover its accom¬ 
 panying morality is also steeped, although it has 
 a use as serving for a cover of a morality really 
 the birth of the present condition of things, 
 and this is clung to with a determination or even 
 ferocity natural enough, since its aim is the per¬ 
 petuation of individual property in wealth, in 
 workman, in wife, in child. 
 
 The so-called morality of the present age is 
 simply commercial necessity, masquerading in the 
 forms of the Christian ethics: for instance, com¬ 
 mercial honor is merely the code necessitated 
 
14 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 by the needs of men in commercial relations 
 which without it could not subsist, and which has 
 au fond nothing in common with the Christian 
 “do unto others as thou wouldst,” etc., maxim, 
 in the name of which it is on occasion invoked. 
 The only connection that current commercial 
 ethics has with the Christian is, as we said above, 
 a purely formal one. The mystical individualist 
 ethics of Christianity, which had for its supreme 
 end another world and spiritual salvation therein, 
 has been transformed into an individualistic ethic 
 having for its supreme end (tacitly, if not avow¬ 
 edly), the material salvation of the individual in 
 the commercial battle of this world. This is 
 illustrated by a predominance amongst the com¬ 
 mercial classes of a debased Calvinistic theology, 
 termed Evangelicalism, 1 which is the only form 
 of religion these classes can understand—the 
 poetico-mystical element in the earlier Christian¬ 
 ity being eliminated therefrom, and the “natural 
 laws” of profit and loss, and the devil take the 
 hindmost, which dominate this carnal world, be¬ 
 ing as nearly as possible reproduced into the 
 spiritual world of its conception. 
 
 It may surprise some to be told that politics 
 share this unreality to the full, since it is gen¬ 
 erally supposed that democracy has at last really 
 triumphed and is now entering into its kingdom. 
 Doubtless the political events of this century have 
 
 1 If it be said that Evangelicalism is no longer flour¬ 
 ishing, that is true in the Church of England; but the 
 large and exceedingly influential body of dissenters 
 still remains intact. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 15 
 
 convinced every one that change in the relations 
 of men to each other is at hand; but before 
 that change can come, it must be understood that 
 the development of the people must be on other 
 lines than politicians now dream of. It is true 
 that political freedom is thought to have been 
 gained, but what is the nature of the gain? 
 What is the end and aim of that political free¬ 
 dom which all parties in the State profess to 
 be striving to accomplish ? Once more it is 
 a sham, designed really to keep the mass of men 
 helpless and divided, so that they may still be 
 the instruments of the strong and successful. It 
 takes various forms: for example, the land is to 
 be freed from the last remains of feudality and 
 so become more compltely a mere portion of 
 profit-breeding capital, thus helping the mon¬ 
 strous aggregation of riches that is reducing all 
 life to a misery. Parents and parsons are to be 
 free to teach children what they will, thus de¬ 
 priving the unfortunate creatures of the most 
 necessary aids to human development. Trade 
 and manufacture are to be freed from all tram¬ 
 mels, so that the mass of the people may be 
 compelled to serve the needs, both as producers 
 and as buyers, of those who have but one object, 
 to sell at a profit. 
 
 For the sustaining of this glorious “freedom,” 
 otherwise spoken of as the “sanctity of contract,” 
 government by party is a recognized and effective 
 instrument. In this arrangement the members of 
 Parliament are divided into two sides, much as 
 lads about to play a game at football; the two 
 
 
16 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 sides do not differ much in their principles, though 
 there is sometimes a violent faction squabble as 
 to the amount of concession that it is safe to give 
 to or withhold from the demands of the people: 
 not seldom even this difference does not exist— 
 the legislation proposed by both parties is almost 
 identical, and some safe excuse for quarrel has to 
 be sought for before the game can be played. 
 Thus is carried out the crowning sham of modern 
 politics under the absurd title of Representative 
 Government, and the name of democracy is used 
 to cloak an oligarchy more or less extended, while 
 once more all decent people who may profess an 
 interest in politics are expected to range them¬ 
 selves under one or other of the great political 
 parties, now become almost less than mere names, 
 the very shadow of shadows. 
 
 When all life, domestic, religious, moral and 
 political, is thus fallen into mere pretence, when 
 all these branches of men’s energy have come to 
 professing aims which, when they have any, are 
 not their real aims, and on which they will not 
 and cannot act, when they do not know what 
 they really are and are blind to their real destiny, 
 how can it be possible that Art, the expression 
 of the life of society, can be otherwise than a 
 sham also ? Here and there indeed the irrepressi¬ 
 ble genius of an individual expresses itself by 
 dint of toil and anxiety undreamed of in better 
 days, and produces works of art that are beau¬ 
 tiful and powerful, however damaged by the 
 souring effects of a desperate struggle against 
 monstrous surroundings, and by the restlessness 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 17 
 
 that comes of the over-exertion even of great 
 powers. But otherwise the fine arts no longer 
 exist for the people at large. How could they? 
 The one reality of modern society is industrial 
 slavery, far-reaching and intimate, supreme over 
 every man’s life, dominating every action of it 
 from the greatest to the least: no man and no 
 set of men can do anything that does not tend 
 towards the support of this slavery unless they 
 act as conscious rebels against it. Men living 
 under such conditions cannot produce social art 
 or architecture (with all that grasp of the deco¬ 
 rative cycle of the arts which that word means), 
 or even desire to do so; they have lost all under¬ 
 standing of what it is; the mass of the people 
 have nothing to do with Art architectural except 
 so far as they are compelled to produce the 
 sham of it mechanically as a trade finish to wares, 
 so as to give them a higher marketable value. 
 Space fails us here to contrast this condition 
 of things with that of the epochs that produced 
 Art, or to show the consequences of the differ¬ 
 ence. Suffice it to say once more that, except 
 for the very few works produced by men of 
 exceptional genius, which works the general pub¬ 
 lic does not relish or understand in the least, Art 
 is for the most part dormant. 
 
 In this brief review of the various phases of 
 modern life,—its family relations, morality, reli¬ 
 gion, politics, and art,—the reader who has not 
 yet studied socialism may see nothing but pes¬ 
 simism. For until recently amongst cultivated peo¬ 
 ple, enjoying whatever advantages may be derived 
 
18 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 from civilization, there has been an almost uni¬ 
 versal belief, not yet much broken into, that mod¬ 
 ern or bourgeois civilization is the final form 
 of human society. Were this the case we should 
 be pessimists indeed, but happily we know that 
 civilization is only a stage in the development 
 of the human race, just as barbarism was, or 
 the savagery of the progressive nations. Civil¬ 
 ization must of necessity develop into some other 
 form of society, the tendencies of which we can 
 see, but not the details; for it is now becoming 
 clear that this new state of society can only be 
 reached through the great economic, moral, and 
 political change which we call Socialism; and the 
 essential foundation of this is the raising of the 
 working classes to a point that gives them a con¬ 
 trol over their own labor and its product. 
 
 In order that our readers may get a correct 
 view of this, it is necessary to use the historic 
 method—that is to say, to trace the development 
 of society from its early times up to the full ex¬ 
 pression of the commercial period, which has 
 created and is now creating such a vast mass of 
 discontent, not only amongst the working classes 
 who suffer directly from the oppression that is a 
 necessary part of it, but also in various and 
 sometimes discordant forms, amongst the well- 
 to-do, who on the face of things are benefited by 
 its working. We propose to finish the book by 
 giving our own impressions both of the imme¬ 
 diate issue of the present stir and commotion in 
 socio-political life, and also of what may be rea¬ 
 sonably expected from the new society when it 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 19 
 
 has at last supplanted the ever-increasing con¬ 
 fusion of the present day. Only it must be pre¬ 
 mised that this last part can be nothing more than 
 the expression of our own individual views, and 
 that we do not claim any further weight for it. 
 Although it has been often attempted, it is im¬ 
 possible to build up a scheme for the society of- 
 the future, for no man can really think himself 
 out of his own days; his palace of days to come 
 can only be constructed from the aspirations 
 forced upon him by his present surroundings, 
 and from his dreams of the life of the past, which 
 themselves cannot fail to be more or less unsub¬ 
 stantial imaginings. 
 
 At least we can boldly assert that those who 
 think that the civilization of our own time will 
 not be transformed both in shape and in essence, 
 hold their opinion in the teeth of the witness of 
 all history. This cannot be set aside by taking 
 refuge in platitudes about “human nature/’ which 
 are really deduced from orthodox theology and 
 an obsolete view of history. Human nature is 
 itself a growth of the ages, and is ever and 
 indefinitely moulded by the conditions under 
 which it finds itself. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 TT is, or has been, a commonplace with many 
 that the system of to-day has been made 
 by the growth of ages, and that our wills in the 
 present are impotent to change it: but those who 
 put this forward from their position of “stand¬ 
 ing on the ancient ways/’ fail to see that this 
 very fact condemns that position. The business 
 of progressive minds is to recognize the coming 
 change, to clear away obstacles to it, to accept it, 
 and to organize it in detail. Reactionists, how¬ 
 ever, although they deny it and profess to accept 
 moderate, i.e. non-essential change, are trying 
 consciously to stay that very evolution at the 
 point which it has reached to-day: they are 
 attempting to turn the transient into the eternal: 
 therefore by persistently reading the spirit of 
 the present into the records of the past, they 
 really annihilate history, which is not a mere 
 series of actual events through which society, 
 crystallized at once and forever as to its essen¬ 
 tials in the form that it assumes now, has cut 
 its way, but is really one with the present society 
 of which we are ourselves a part; is in fact 
 
 21 
 
22 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 society as regarded from its dynamic aspect, as 
 the agent and patient of change. The 18th cen¬ 
 tury view of history was entirely based on the 
 above-mentioned narrowness of conception, 1 
 which forced men to> look on “Homer” as a 
 literary man, like, say Dryden and Pope, and 
 on Lycurgus as an early Dr. Johnson. 
 
 The hopes for the social life of the future are 
 involved in its struggles in the past; which in¬ 
 deed, since they have built up the present system, 
 and created us out of its conflict towards fresh 
 change, have really forced us, whether we will 
 it or not, into our present position of seeking 
 still further change. 
 
 Modern civilized society has been developed 
 by the antagonism between individual and social 
 interests, between the holding of property in 
 severalty and in common; and between the 
 simple and limited kinship group, and the com¬ 
 plex and extended political whole, or impersonal 
 state, which has transformed primitive society 
 into civilization. 
 
 The difference between these opposing circum¬ 
 stances of society is, in fact, that between an 
 organism and a mechanism. The earlier condi¬ 
 tion in which everything, art, science (so far as 
 it went), law, industry, were personal, and 
 
 1 It is curious to note how this view has acted on a 
 man of such insight and such capacity for research 
 as the late Lewis H. Morgan, who seeks the American 
 democratic constitution in the beginnings of the social 
 evolution, alike in the Iroquois tribe, in the Greek 
 polis, and in the Roman city of the regal period. 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 23 
 
 aspects of a living body, is opposed to the civ¬ 
 ilized condition in which all these elements have 
 become mechanical, uniting to build up mechan¬ 
 ical life, and themselves the product of machines 
 material and moral. 
 
 That all our industry and art is produced by 
 a system of machinery is a fact too obvious to 
 need enlarging on in this place. 1 But it may not 
 be so clear to many that the system is dominant 
 over other departments of human life; for 
 instance, the blood-feud and the weregild were 
 the foundation of early or “customary” criminal 
 law : the penalty of the offender being rather 
 negative than positive. In customary law the 
 protection of society was withdrawn from the 
 offender: in political law, society itself delegates 
 certain men, who, without having any personal 
 or social relations to the criminal or his victim, 
 have to undertake his punishment, that is to 
 injure him by a mechanical procedure, so that 
 the offender, instead of being a person excluded 
 from the benefits of society, and merely ignored 
 by it, has become an enemy with whose destruc¬ 
 tion, or existence in a mutilated condition, society 
 must charge itself. 
 
 The machine of criminal law is first set in 
 motion by the police: the judge gives the law 
 to the jury as a hard and fast mechanical rule, 
 on that rule the verdict is given by the jury, the 
 prisoner is sentenced by the judge by the same 
 
 1 It has, moreover, often been dwelt upon by the 
 present writers. 
 
24 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 method, and is handed over after sentence to the 
 jailor, who in his turn has to torture him by pre¬ 
 scribed mechanical process, knowing maybe noth¬ 
 ing of his crime or his history, distinguishing 
 him from his fellow-prisoners not by a name, but 
 by a number. 
 
 The same thing clearly applies to civil pro¬ 
 cedure, which is, if anything, of a still more 
 routine character. It guards wealth, not as 
 wealth, but as property only. Thus when it has 
 to deal with the case of a lunatic, its interest 
 lies in preserving his estate while the dealings 
 with his person are put in another and subsidiary 
 category. The difference between this machine 
 law, and the arbitration, according to customary 
 usage, of the chief, or primus inter pares , is suffi¬ 
 ciently obvious. 
 
 It must now be admitted that no traces exist 
 of any race of mankind living otherwise than 
 in a society of some kind or other; the few 
 examples, in which this was supposed to be the 
 case, proving to be instances not of survival but 
 of degradation. This primitive society at the 
 lowest stage discoverable had little knowledge of 
 tools even when co-operation in matters of detail 
 was considerably advanced. An instance may 
 be given in the act of cultivation before the 
 invention of the spade, where a gang of tillers 
 thrust mere stout sticks into a ridge of earth, 
 and by means of a combined heave turned the 
 soil over. Indeed labor, as far as it went, was, 
 under the conditions of the mere nomadic horde, 
 co-operative. But the beginnings of a greater 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 25 
 
 power over nature, mainly brought about by an 
 advance in the co-operation of labor, produced 
 a more complex form of society, which is the 
 first society of which we have any definite knowl¬ 
 edge. The land began to be accepted as the 
 source of the wealth of the community, and as 
 such, whether for pasture or tillage, was recog¬ 
 nized as the definite property of the community 
 as against other communities. The right of the 
 individual holding (as opposed to ownership) of 
 Property was based entirely on use, so that there 
 was none that was not common, except the man’s 
 personal gear, such as clothes, arms, and the 
 like; this is illustrated by the primitive customs 
 which at first sight seems to contradict it, of the 
 interment of the warrior’s arms, etc., with him, 
 for these were so buried because they were sup¬ 
 posed to be necessary for his use in the contin¬ 
 uous life which he was to lead in the land of 
 shadows. 
 
 This primitive community took the form of a 
 narrow and exclusive group based on the kinship, 
 real or supposed, of its members. The three 
 integral bodies in this society are the Gens, the 
 Tribe, and the People. The Gens is a group 
 founded on actual blood relationship, in which 
 inter-marriage is forbidden; it cannot exist sep¬ 
 arately therefore, but must have another Gens 
 for its complement: thus, since no “Eagle” man 
 can have sexual intercourse with an “Eagle” 
 woman, there is at hand a “Wolf”-gens for inter¬ 
 marriage. 
 
 These Gentes have a tendency to coalesce and 
 
26 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 form the Tribe, in which kinship is still supposed, 
 but is not necessarily actual; as time goes on, 
 the Gentes tend to lose their autonomous exist¬ 
 ence in the Tribe; but the Tribe in its turn tends 
 to merge itself into a higher unity, the People, 
 which is a federation of tribes, and in which the 
 formal traditional kinship is in general merely 
 mythical. 
 
 The opinion first put forward by Bachofen is 
 now commonly held, that, at first, descent in the 
 Gens was traced wholly through the mother, and 
 that consequently the women were the recognized 
 predominant element therein, the stock historical 
 instance being that of the Lycians. as mentioned 
 by Herodotus. 
 
 Among the Oriental Races at this period the 
 patriarchal family had tended to supersede the 
 Gens as the unit of social life. In Europe some¬ 
 thing the same in essence, but modified in form, 
 grew up as the Roman Familia, of which we 
 shall treat later on. It may be added that the 
 existing conditions of life among the Bedouins 
 in Arabia seem to show a curious blending of 
 patriarchal society with that of the Gens and the 
 Tribe. For the rest the primitive Patriarchal 
 family, generally speaking, arose from the privi¬ 
 lege of primacy of sexual intercourse held by 
 the elder brother of the Gens. This is indicated, 
 amongst other things, by the custom known as 
 the Levirate, “the raising up seed to the brother,” 
 mentioned in Genesis and in the Gospels. The 
 last survival of it was the jus primae noctis of 
 mediaeval customary law, and its accompanying 
 

 ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 27 
 
 
 tenure of Borough English. It was along this 
 line that patriarchal property-polygamy devel¬ 
 oped, and at last the modern monogamous fam- 
 ily. 
 
 These groups above mentioned, whether 
 People, Tribe, or Gens, were essentially exclu¬ 
 sive; within their limits peace and community of 
 property was the rule—without, a state of war 
 was assumed; it was not war that had to be 
 declared, but peace; the market, for instance, 
 was originally held on the neutral zone between 
 two social groups, where they could meet to 
 exchange commodities. 1 
 
 The continuous wars which resulted from this 
 condition of things necessarily produced slavery. 
 This slavery was of two kinds more or less 
 distinct from one another. A migratory tribe 
 or people, in conquering a settled population, 
 after the fighting was over, allowed the van¬ 
 quished to live on a portion of the conquered 
 lands, on the conditions of rendering service to 
 their lords; they were the serfs of their con¬ 
 querors. 
 
 Frequent raids by the gentes or clans on each 
 other produced another kind of slaves: the cap¬ 
 tives taken in battle ceased to be slain on the 
 field, as soon as the captors found out that they 
 could be used for labor which produced more 
 than their bare subsistence: this was the origin 
 of the Chattel Slave, who was the actual property 
 of the conquering group, as the horses or oxen 
 were. 
 
 1 Cf. Sir Henry Maine, Village Communities . 
 
28 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 * 
 
 The head of the kinship society, by virtue of 
 his position as representative of the original an¬ 
 cestor, was the custodian of its wealth, and its 
 leader in battle. But the frequency of wars often 
 made other leaders necessary besides this hered¬ 
 itary chief, and these naturally began to have 
 predominance over the undistinguished kinsmen. 
 Meantime the power of production was ever on 
 the increase: stone tools gave place first to 
 bronze, and then to iron. The nomad tribes 
 began to settle when they discovered the art of 
 producing grain from the original wild grasses, 
 and supplemented their milk and flesh diet with 
 meal and bread; wealth began to increase beyond 
 the immediate needs of a limited population 
 amidst limitless natural resources. 
 
 Since therefore there was an excess of wealth 
 over bare necessity, its distribution began to be 
 unequal, and the hereditary and elected leaders 
 were allowed to consume more than the general 
 average of that wealth, and class society began 
 to appear, its first representatives being the chief 
 and his immediate household. 
 
 By this time the older nomadic tribes had 
 turned into settled communities living in vil¬ 
 lages, and surrounded by tillage, the whole en¬ 
 closed by a stockade. In mountainous or hilly 
 countries this was dominated by a fortress on 
 an elevation, called the Bury or Burg. And in 
 this burg and stockaded village we have the first 
 element of the City. 
 
 The religion of Barbarism was ancestor- 
 
 worship coupled with universal animism,—that 
 
 * 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 29 
 
 is to say, the conception of every thing in the 
 world, animate and inanimate, as a being en¬ 
 dowed with human will and consciousness. The 
 meeting point of these two elements of barbaric 
 religion was the toteny of the group, which was 
 usually an animal or plant to which special relig¬ 
 ious honors were paid, and which was some¬ 
 thing more than a mere symbol of the ancestor, 
 and was in fact looked upon almost as being the 
 ancestor himself. It is the more difficult for us 
 moderns to conceive of the state of mind that 
 produced this notion, because we are so much 
 further removed from nature than was primitive 
 man; the development of the faculty of reflection 
 has blunted the intuition of the senses, so that 
 much that was assumed as real by early man 
 has become preposterously inconceivable to us, 
 though it seems as if there were examples of 
 the survival in children of their near relation to 
 nature, for some of them certainly accept their 
 pets, toys, etc., as companions of a similar living 
 race to themselves. 
 
 We would say here that some anthropologists, 
 in drawing analogies between the condition of 
 the present savage races and that of the ancestors 
 of the progressive races, seem to us to be too 
 confident in accepting those conditions as being 
 identical. May it not be possible that there is 
 an essential difference between the savage 
 peoples of to-day and the early historical races; 
 a difference which forbids the former to develop 
 beyond a condition of savagery, and that there- 
 
so 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 fore these historical races have never passed 
 through a state of society precisely identical with 
 those of the modern savage? 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE FIRST HISTORICAL OR ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 A NCIENT barbarism developed naturally into 
 Ancient Civilization, which, as the name 
 implies, took the form of city life. This develop¬ 
 ment was furthered by the fact that, when the 
 tribes began to settle, those dwellings throve 
 most which were naturally protected by the lie 
 of the land, so that the anxiety for the safe¬ 
 guarding of the wealth of the community was 
 not constantly pressing. And these best pro¬ 
 tected and consequently most thriving places be¬ 
 came the nuclei of the great cities of antiquity, 
 such as Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Jerusalem, 
 Corinth, Athens, Rome, etc. Babylon, by the 
 way, if the accepted measurements of its walls 
 are anywhere near correctness, seems to have 
 been rather a walled-round district than what we 
 should now call a city, and may therefore be 
 considered a very direct development from the 
 stockaded home-field of the tribal group. 
 
 As the tribe or people settled, there was a ten¬ 
 dency towards a further development of the 
 cultus of the ancestor, which gradually fixed his 
 imagined deeds and tomb in a certain locality. 
 
33 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 The sanctity of this place made it the centre of 
 the life of the community, and the members of 
 the groups, which were now increasing- in num¬ 
 bers, flocked to it for common worship and inter¬ 
 course, as well as for protection. This greater 
 centralization tended to obscure the lesser centres 
 (the clan, tribe, etc.), and at last left them rudi¬ 
 mentary, mere local names, sometimes with relig¬ 
 ious rites attached to them. 1 
 
 The arts of building which began with the 
 settlement of the tribe, and which were used in 
 completing the raising of the burg and the wall¬ 
 ing of the common homestead, now received fur¬ 
 ther impetus from being used for the great 
 temple of the eponomous ancestor (that is, the 
 original father of the tribe, real or supposed) of 
 the whmle community, in which each clan (of the 
 People) had its own shrine or chapel dedicated 
 to its own special ancestor. 
 
 By the time this was accomplished the city was 
 the one unit of life and centre of worship, and 
 of the group-organizations, the lands of the com¬ 
 munity surrounding it being the property of those 
 clans, and exploited by them for their livelihood, 
 
 1 The great Epos of Troy, in which the Holy City 
 plays such a central and predominating part, is a 
 good illustration of this growth of the burg into the 
 city, and it may be noted that the Holy City was the 
 centre of the Hellenes of Asia, where civilization was 
 more advanced, whereas their ruder European brethren 
 felt themselves the enemy of the new developmnt, just 
 as in England the incoming Teutonic people fell on the 
 Roman cities then existing, which, when conquered, they 
 could make no use of, but merely destroyed. 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 33 
 
 while their social and religious home was in the 
 city itself. 
 
 But in the city social was being fast trans¬ 
 formed into political life by the destruction of the 
 independence of the ancient groups, and 
 the dying out of real personal relations 
 between their members; for this was ac¬ 
 companied by the change in the ownership 
 of land which now made the citizen a represent¬ 
 ative and possessor of a portion of the city terri¬ 
 tory ; whereas heretofore the land was an affix 
 to the social group, the individual member of 
 which enjoyed its advantages simply as a mem¬ 
 ber of that corporation. 1 In short, in the earlier 
 times the land belonged to the group; now the 
 individual belonged to the land. 
 
 Accompanying this change there took place a 
 development of the market which before this 
 centralization was infrequent and spasmodic, 
 depending on periods of truce between warring 
 tribes, but which now became a regular and set¬ 
 tled institution under a protection of the burg 
 and its citizens, and was thus one of the chief 
 elements in the growth of the importance and 
 power of the cities. And the communication 
 between different districts and countries which 
 
 1 It is worth while noting, as showing that there are 
 yet left definite survivals of tribal life, that one of the 
 incidents in the recent anti-Christian movement in 
 China was a solemn proclamtion from certain of the 
 tribes calling on another tribe much infected by Chris¬ 
 tianity to purge itself of the offense by expelling the 
 offending members if they proved to be obstinate. 
 
34 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 this settled and protected market set on foot, also 
 tended to the federation of the cities, which was 
 one of the leading ideas of the ancient historical 
 period. 
 
 Slavery of the chattel kind now grew rapidly, 
 with the result that the usufruct of the land 
 became much more valuable, as raw material was 
 worked up by the constant labor of slaves into 
 marketable wares. This growing wealth created 
 a narrow aristocracy, the members of which 
 were the freemen of the old clans. These were 
 imbedded in a population composed to a great 
 degree of slaves as aforesaid, but also of men 
 who, though not in a servile condition, did not 
 share in the privileges of the original kinship 
 and founders of the city. These were the frag¬ 
 ments of broken-up clans of the neighboring 
 country, or emancipated slaves who had drifted 
 towards the paramount city. The great historical 
 instance of this is the story of the Roman plebs, 
 which, it must be remembered, is not an accident 
 peculiar to Roman society, but was going on at 
 various periods throughout the whole of inchoate 
 ancient civilization, and also in the Teutonic 
 countries of Early Mediaeval Europe. 
 
 We believe that this, or something like it, was 
 the origin and condition of all the great cities 
 of antiquity, alike of the great oriental empires, 
 Egypt included, and of the Greek and Italian 
 communities. As for the empires of the East 
 they were originally only federations of great 
 cities, just as the cities themselves originated in 
 federations of clans and tribes. The semi-godlike 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 35 
 
 position of the king in these empires was doubt¬ 
 less a recurrence of the worship of the tribal 
 ancestor, now transferred to the embodied sym¬ 
 bol of the collective ancestor-worship of the fed¬ 
 eration. As the progressive races issue from the 
 prehistoric times, we find them segregated into 
 four great sections, or civilizations, the first and 
 most important dwelling in the valley of the 
 Tigris and Euphrates; the next in importance in 
 the valley of the Nile; the third on the Yang- 
 tsze-kiang; and the fourth on the Ganges. 
 
 At a later period, when the energies of the 
 progressive races required fresh developments, 
 the shores of the eastern portion of the Mediter¬ 
 ranean were peopled by the most adventurous 
 and most progressive of those races, to whom we 
 will now turn as affording the most typical in¬ 
 stances of the development of city life, and as 
 those of whom we have the most definite infor¬ 
 mation. 
 
 With the period of the Homeric poems this 
 civilization of the classical peoples emerges from 
 its prehistoric; beginnings. In the literature of 
 this period there are few indications on the sur¬ 
 face of the barbaric group-society, although 
 search reveals at least some of these, amongst 
 which may be mentioned the account in the Iliad 
 of the household of Priam, which seems to have 
 been a complete and recognized Gens. Again, 
 the end of the Odyssey, which appears from the 
 modern literary point of view such a purposeless 
 anti-climax, was once a history that the rhap- 
 sodist could not possibly evade, of the blood-feud 
 
36 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 after the suitors, the slaying of whom, according 
 to modern ideas of ancient manners, was a per¬ 
 fectly justifiable homicide. But in an earlier 
 society it was not crime that had to be punished , 
 but a tribal injury, which had to be atoned for 
 either by blood or the price of blood. Whatever 
 the merits of the quarrel might have been, the 
 ethics of kinship would compel the Gentes, to 
 whom the slain men belonged, to follow up the 
 feud to appeasement, which even in the present 
 state of the text takes place in the Odyssey, v 
 The remains of so-called cities, as at Mycenae 
 and Tyryns, turn out on investigation to have 
 been the dwelling of the chieftain of the clan, 
 or the burg, that is to say, the germ of the city 
 of civilization. The two typical forms of this 
 city which went through a long development, 
 very obscure at certain stages, are Lacedaemon 
 and Athens. The former retained in its consti¬ 
 tution a great part of the communal organization, 
 and even habits of the group-society, out of which 
 it had grown. This is shown on one hand by the 
 common dinner of the freemen, and the general 
 tendency of the Lycurgan legislation, some of the 
 instances of which have been so curiously mis¬ 
 understood by later exponents, who saw in them 
 mere artificial and arbitrary regulations having 
 the conscious end of sustaining the warlike spirit 
 of the citizens, instead of being, as they were, 
 survivals crystallized from the early stage of 
 development. An obvious example is the well- 
 known story of the boy who had stolen the fox, 
 which is given as an illustration of the Lycurgan 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 3 ? 
 
 law which legalized theft if done with formal 
 secrecy, a law which was felt as so directly 
 opposed to the more modern institution of pri¬ 
 vate property that it needed a euhemeristic ex¬ 
 planation, which of course has no foundation 
 in fact. 
 
 In Athens the change was much more radical, 
 the idea which wielded it much more thoroughly 
 new: it involved the complete transformation of 
 the personal relationship of the free men into a 
 political society. 
 
 But in the revolution which bears the names 
 of Solon and Kleisthenes, the group-society had, 
 first of all, become thoroughly corrupted; since 
 the old Gentes had grown to be close corporations 
 amidst a disorganized society of free men who 
 did not share in their privileges, and who were 
 economically oppressed by the outrageous and 
 bald system of usury practised by the privileged. 
 In Sparta, as above said, the old gentile Com¬ 
 munity retained a great amount of vitality, even 
 amidst the new political order. 
 
 It may be remembered, by the way, that the 
 earlier stages of a new social development always 
 show the characteristic evils of the incoming sys¬ 
 tem, not perhaps in their really worst, but, at 
 least, in their most direct and obvious form. For 
 instance, in all early civilized Communities 
 (recently emerged from group-organizations) 
 usury and litigation are rampant, as, amongst 
 other instances, the elaborate account of the life 
 of the time given in the Icelandic sagas shows 
 us. Again, the earlier days of the great capital- 
 
38 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 istic industries give us examples, worse on the 
 surface, of the cynical brutality which is an 
 essential of Capitalism, than any that are cur¬ 
 rent to-day, although the present evils reach both 
 deeper and wider than they did in its beginnings, 
 and for that very reason are more irremediable 
 under the system. 1 2 
 
 As the change took place at Athens, then, the 
 old Gentes were entirely broken up, except for 
 certain ceremonial and religious purposes, and 
 the free citizens were placed on the lands on 
 certain localities of the territory without any 
 topographical relation to their former position 
 in the kinship clans. Except for the purposes 
 of a few ritual usages, property in severalty 
 took the place of corporate ownership, and the 
 society of the ancient historical city was thus 
 rendered complete as to its essentials: the feder¬ 
 ations of the cities so formed, such as the Doric 
 and Ionian confederacies, had no tendency to 
 consolidate into empires as in the East, but re¬ 
 mained true federations, the units of which were 
 still sovereign cities, and which developed no 
 overlord destined to grow gradually into the des¬ 
 potic head of a quasi-bureaucratic system. 3 
 
 1 As for instance the actual chattel-slavery of the 
 workhouse children consigned to the manufacturers of 
 the northern towns, and their torture to keep them 
 awake during the monstrous duration of the hours of 
 labor, that obtained before the passing of the Factory 
 Act. 
 
 2 The Tyrannies cannot be considered as a develop¬ 
 
 ment of city life but rather as sporadic disease of its 
 corruption; and seldom covered more than single city. 
 
ANCIENT SOCIETY 
 
 39 
 
 The development of the native Italian cities, 
 as distinguished from Greek colonies in Italy, 
 was not in any essential respect different from 
 that of Athens, which may be regarded as the 
 general type of the ancient classical city apart 
 from the Dorian developments, which always re¬ 
 tained some show of the ancient survivals. 
 
 In Rome, the most historically important of 
 the native Italian cities, the very same resolution 
 took place that we have described as to Athens. 
 The first instalment of it was embodied in the 
 legislation ascribed to “Servius Tullius,” which 
 created the Centuries, political bodies based on 
 the possession of property. These were thrust 
 into the kinship groups, the Curiae and tribes, 
 and gradually assimilated the latter to their con¬ 
 ditions. The bodies so formed became the free 
 men or burgesses of early historical Rome. The 
 plebs, which originally constituted the unpriv¬ 
 ileged free men, was thus taken into the political 
 system and attained a measure of privilege, the 
 struggle for the increase of which forms the staple 
 of Roman history for the next three centuries; 
 these plebeian citizens at first were in the main 
 the craftsmen of the city; slave-labor at that 
 period apparently not touching that side of pro¬ 
 duction much. But from the first the idea of 
 conquest was always dominant in the Roman 
 community, so that this organization of free men 
 was the political side of a system mainly directed 
 towards the upholding of an effective army. This 
 was, of course, conspicuous in early days owing 
 to the necessities of the case; but in later times 
 
40 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 the army organization was the engine by which 
 the plutocratic classes impressed their power on 
 the State. The Equestrian order, as the name 
 implies, was originally the cavalry of the Roman 
 army, composed of the richer citizens, since their 
 equipment was more expensive; but in later 
 times, when the bureaucracy was being formed, 
 it became little more than a formal title of hon¬ 
 or, indicating the possession of riches. 
 
 The Gracchan legislation points to the rise of 
 this plutocracy, and its struggles with the older 
 nobility, the patrician order, which by this time 
 had diminished to a very small part of the popu¬ 
 lation. It became finally dominant in the last 
 days of the republic, and after having produced 
 the chaotic period, during which Roman history 
 is a record of the struggles of great individual¬ 
 ities amongst the rich, was reduced to order by 
 the early empire. The latter was a definite and 
 stable bureaucratic system, which was at least so 
 much of an improvement as to make life toler¬ 
 able for most people. All rights indeed, both 
 political and social, had disappeared, except the 
 rights of property as interpreted by the law 
 courts; but the lower ranks of society, including 
 the slaves, were decidedly bettered by the 
 change; while the well-to-do were in a state of 
 material ease unrivalled in the world’s history. 
 
 The institutions of marriage and slavery 
 played a great part in the above-mentioned de¬ 
 velopment of society. The group-marriage of 
 the early kinship Communities, on the change in 
 the holding of property becoming marked, grew 
 
I 
 
 ANCIENT SOCIETY 41 
 
 to be superseded by a quasi-monogamy, which 
 was in force at least as early as the Homeric 
 period, though it is clear from that literature that 
 it was personally, apart from the rights of prop¬ 
 erty and succession, a very loose tie, and was 
 supplemented by widespread recognized concubi¬ 
 nage. 
 
 Throughout the whole of the classical period 
 practically the same rate of things obtained. But 
 as the republic of Rome drew near to its fall, 
 the monogamic institution was still further weak¬ 
 ened, and became little more than a contract dis¬ 
 soluble by will; and advantage of this fact was 
 commonly taken. In the end, in the later days 
 of the Empire, marriage was looked upon as 
 so irksome that it was little resorted to, its place 
 being supplied by intercourse with the female 
 slaves, with the result that the population began 
 obviously to decrease owing to the non-rearing 
 of children. 
 
 This subject leads naturally to the consider¬ 
 ation of the Roman familia, which consisted of 
 wife, children, and slaves, ail under the absolute 
 power of the head of the household, or pater¬ 
 familias ; attached to this family through their 
 relations to the paterfamilias were the clients, 
 who, though not directly under his absolute 
 power, were practically bound to him by econ¬ 
 omic and social ties, since he was their guardian 
 and their protector generally. The relation of 
 this, amidst all differences, to the kinship group 
 is clear, as well as its demarcation from the 
 polygamic patriarchal family of the East. It 
 
 
42 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 must be remembered that the power of life and 
 death, in short of jurisdiction, of the pater¬ 
 familias over all the members of the family was 
 real and not merely formal. It will be seen 
 therefore that the monogamic family was the 
 lowest unit in classical society, as the Gens was 
 in the early group-society; and also it must be 
 said that the working of the transformation of 
 personal into political society is very clearly 
 marked by the differences between the classical 
 family and the barbaric Gens, Curia, or Clan. 
 
 The oligarchies which became the masters of 
 this social state, owing to the ambition of their 
 more able members, who found their support in 
 the democracies, were self-destructive, and be¬ 
 fore long gave way to the absolutist power which 
 was the core of them, and their place was taken 
 in the Greek world by the so-called Tyrannies, 
 and in the Roman world by the Empire. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE TRANSITION FROM THE CLASSICAL TO THE 
 
 MEDIAEVAL PERIOD 
 
 A NCIENT civilization used to be considered 
 as the direct parent of modern society, 
 with nothing between them but a chaos of merely 
 negative lapse of time, as is sufficiently indicated 
 by the name given to the latter period—the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 But it is now recognized that this supposed 
 chaos had an order of its own, and was an 
 integral and necessary part of the evolution of 
 primitive into modern life. And it may here be 
 said that the close resemblance on many points 
 between the pre-classical period of antiquity, the 
 epoch of the Homeric poems, and the Middle 
 Ages is very noteworthy. We have now to in¬ 
 quire into the transition which brought about the 
 change from the one system to the other. 
 
 First as to the economical side. The classical 
 system of production was founded on chattel- 
 slavery, the mediaeval on serfdom, and it was the 
 change from the one labor-system to the other 
 which was the special characteristic of the transi¬ 
 tion. 
 
 43 
 
44 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 Agriculture was the dominating industry of 
 the classical world, and this part of labor was 
 almost entirely the work of chattel-slaves, the 
 property of the great landowners. As long as 
 the Empire was at peace about its great centres, 
 this system went on without serious check, since 
 the servile insurrections belong to the times of 
 civil brawl before the Empire; though it is true 
 that a reflection of the miseries of the slaves is 
 to be found in the chronic brigandage and piracy 
 that infested ancient civilization during its whole 
 period. But as the Empire contracted its bound¬ 
 aries, and actual war drew near its centre, while 
 its grasping and corrupt tax-gathering bureau¬ 
 cracy dried up its resources, destroyed its mar¬ 
 kets, and withered its population, the approach 
 of sheer ruin shattered the foundation of chattel- 
 slavery on which it rested. And it must be 
 remembered, once for all, that neither prosperity 
 nor adversity, neither good emperors nor bad, 
 neither peace nor war, could release Roman so¬ 
 ciety from this plague of tax-gathering, any more 
 than any increasing sense of the responsibility of 
 the rich for the lives of the poor, or any fresh 
 aspirations towards individual righteousness, can 
 free modern society from the thraldom of the 
 hunt for profit. 
 
 The great commercial estates of the Romans, 
 under the name of Latifundia, had absorbed all 
 the agricultural industry of the earlier Roman 
 state, which had once been in the hands of the 
 blood relations and household slaves of the pater¬ 
 familias. But now the profit of working these 
 
THE TRANSITION PERIOD 
 
 45 
 
 lands by the instrument of well-organized slavery 
 was vanishing, owing to the break up of the 
 ancient world-market, and the consequently im¬ 
 pending ruin. Nothing now remained for the 
 masters of these slaves but to shake off the re¬ 
 sponsibility for their livelihood, and allow them 
 to cultivate the land in a rough and unorganized 
 way, as partially independent peasants, paying 
 rent in kind and service to the landowners. This 
 seems to have been one of the methods of the 
 merging of the chattel-slave into the mediaeval 
 serf. 
 
 At the same time, not only did this go on very 
 gradually, but domestic slavery and the servile 
 condition of the craftsmen was synchronous 
 with it. 
 
 The other element towards the birth of the 
 feudal system was added by the tribal barbarians 
 who broke in on the last days of the Empire. 
 These bore with them ideas and customs that 
 differed in detail rather than in essence from 
 those of the earlier classical epoch; and though 
 they no doubt had “thralls,” i.e. chattel-slaves, yet 
 those thralls at the worst were in as good a posi¬ 
 tion as the household slaves of the peasant-lords 
 of early Rome, were frequently manumitted, and 
 remained the freedmen of their former masters, 
 still doing service to them. 
 
 And this idea of service in return for protec¬ 
 tion, which had been once a Roman idea, was 
 still an essential part of the life of the barbarian 
 tribes, and they imported it into the society that 
 
46 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 was gradually growing up from the debris of 
 classical society. 
 
 Thus met the two elements necessary for the 
 social life of the new epoch—one the result of 
 the internal decay of the old system; the other, 
 the growth of the unbroken original barbaric 
 constitution. 
 
 But the ethical and religious conditions were 
 also changing, along with the economical: the 
 break-up of the constitution of the cities de¬ 
 stroyed the social religion of city-worship; and 
 though some of the forms of the old ancestor- 
 religions and nature-cults of the ancient tribes 
 still survived, the real characteristics of that re¬ 
 ligion had vanished. 
 
 To fill the void so created in men’s minds after 
 the fall of this public faith, there arose another 
 that concentrated the interest on the individual 
 personality, now completely dissociated from its 
 old social ties; concentrated it indeed on this 
 individuality as being something supernatural, 
 and bearing a mysterious relationship with the 
 supreme supernatural power of the universe. 
 Thus it created a religion of the holiness of the 
 soul, as distinct from that righteousness of the 
 material man shown through his actions under 
 a sense of his responsibility to his fellow-men, 
 as embodied in the society of which he was a 
 part. 
 
 This personal religion took the form of Mys¬ 
 teries, some of which were of ancestral or nature- 
 worship origin, but which now received a new 
 application, and symbolized in their ritual spec- 
 
THE TRANSITION PERIOD 
 
 47 
 
 tacles the state of the soul after death, and its 
 ultimate union, when thoroughly purified, with 
 the Supreme Essence or the Divinity of things. 
 In its pagan form as a matter of course it implied 
 a complete distinction between the cultivated, 
 who could aspire to an understanding of such 
 high matters, and the unleisured vulgar herd, 
 who saw in the Mysteries mere ceremonies, with 
 an exoteric significance only. As this new re¬ 
 ligious spirit developed into Christianity, that 
 exclusiveness proved to be the ruin of its pagan 
 garb since Christianity proclaimed the accessibil¬ 
 ity of all men, “learned and lewd,” to a full 
 share in all its benefits: though, after all, the 
 exclusiveness soon reasserted itself and created 
 a distinction, not this time between the initiated 
 and the profane, or the philosopher and the 
 common man, but between those devoted to a 
 holy life and those living in the world. 
 
 Christianity was thus enabled to carry through 
 the whole of society a tendency before confined 
 to certain classes of the population alone. Thus 
 the church triumphed, nor was its victory with¬ 
 out direct economical causes, for the accumula¬ 
 tion of wealth in the hands of men whose pro¬ 
 fession forbade luxury, which wealth was actually 
 largely spent in the maintenance of the poor, had 
 a strong propagandist influence in times which, 
 to judge from the hints left us by history, imme¬ 
 diately preceded the official establishment of the 
 Christian religion. 
 
 It is also undoubted that the contests which 
 took place throughout the 4th century, and which 
 
48 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 were practically ended by the edicts of Theo¬ 
 dosius suppressing the public exercise of the 
 pagan rites, were mixed with desire on the part 
 of the church to enter into the inheritance of 
 the treasures of the various pagan priesthoods. 
 Thus the official religion of Europe was revolu¬ 
 tionized without hope of return. 
 
 With the change in economics and religion 
 went also the change in the arts. The Archaic 
 art of the classical nations was expressive, spon¬ 
 taneous, and ornamental; in the hands of a 
 people so full of talent of all kinds as the Greeks 
 it rapidly developed in skill of execution, until 
 men aspired to perfection in it where perfection 
 was possible; their strong logical sense perceived 
 the necessary limit herein, and checked all 
 attempts on the outside of that limit; and as a 
 consequence they attained the desired perfection 
 at the expense on the one hand of the full possi¬ 
 bilities of epic expression, and on the other of 
 architectonic ornament. As the public feeling— 
 the sense of delight in the service of the city— 
 died out, so what life there was in this perfect 
 but limited art died with it, and at last a caput 
 mortuum of mere plausible academic art was all 
 that was left, which, however, lasted a long time, 
 until, in fact, Classicism had fallen before Chris¬ 
 tianity. Then after an interregnum of inferiority 
 at once rude and timid, the new art began, influ¬ 
 enced doubtless by the communication with the 
 East. Finally, it becomes obvious to us in the 
 buildings raised by Justinian, especially St. 
 Sophia at Constantinople, which show a new 
 
THE TRANSITION PERIOD 
 
 49 
 
 creation, bearing with it indeed tokens of its 
 birth out of classicism, but yet totally different 
 even as to detail, both in form and spirit. The 
 full weight of the causes which lay behind this 
 transformation will be better appreciated when 
 we come to deal with the art of the fully de¬ 
 veloped Middle Ages. It is enough here to say 
 that a new style was created, that it only awaited 
 the influence of the barbaric tribes to attain com¬ 
 pleteness, and that it developed step by step along 
 with the development of the new society in com¬ 
 plete accord with all its necessities and aspira¬ 
 tions. 
 
 The broken fragments of the Roman Empire 
 amidst all this overturn, had to reckon with that 
 element of the change which was at once more 
 formidable on the surface and most potent for 
 the reconstruction of society, to-wit, the incur¬ 
 sions of the northern barbarian tribes. 
 
 The political change was brought about in this 
 way: Gaul and Spain, Northern Africa, Roman 
 Germany, Britain, countries all populated by col¬ 
 onists and Romanized natives, and even part of 
 Italy itself, fell under the domination of the 
 Teutonic tribes, and the ancestral tribal leaders 
 became their kings and governors, not seldom 
 under the recognized Roman titles of Patrician, 
 Comes, etc. The law of the countries so con¬ 
 quered was the Roman civil law, with the tribal 
 customs grafted on to it. Whatever oral works 
 of imagination they might have carried with 
 them, their literature soon became that of Rome 
 only; for the great epical and mythological 
 
50 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 9 
 
 poems of the race have been kept alive solely 
 by those tribes who never crossed Roman civil¬ 
 ization. 
 
 Their tribal religion soon gave way, nomin¬ 
 ally at least, to the official religion of the Empire, 
 but nevertheless they impressed some of their 
 customary traditions on the Mediaeval Church of 
 the West, and took awav some of its eastern 
 character. Mediaeval Catholicism retained in 
 consequence a certain portion of the this-world- 
 liness and the solidarity of barbarian society, and 
 so shows on one side a communistic interest in 
 the corporation, whether church, guild, parish, or 
 even monastery, which is quite alien to the indi¬ 
 vidualistic introspectivism of the Christianity of 
 the decaying Empire; the latter appears, on the 
 other hand, sporadically, throughout the Middle 
 Ages, in later times gathering volume under the 
 Lollards, and at last culminating in the Protest¬ 
 antism of the Reformation. 
 
 This interpenetration of progressive barbarism 
 and decaying Roman civilization, so essential to 
 the life of the new epoch, began with the first 
 invasion of Italy by the Goths (406), and went 
 on through centuries of confused war and strug¬ 
 gle, till the process of welding together the 
 varying elements grew complete about the time 
 of Charles the Great, who was crowned at Rome 
 in the year 800. Thus was created the phantom 
 of the Holy Roman, really the German, Empire 
 of the Middle Ages, which continued the legend 
 of Roman domination after the feudal system 
 itself had fallen, while Rome became merely a 
 
THE TRANSITION PERIOD 
 
 51 
 
 memory of past history, an ideal for men to look 
 backward to in an age particularly prone to form* 
 ing such ideals. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 MEDIAEVAL SOCIETY-EARLY PERIOD 
 
 VXVE have now to deal with that Mediaeval 
 Society which was based on the fusion 
 of the ideas of tribal communism and Roman 
 individualism and bureaucracy respectfully. 
 
 The transition from the Pax Romanaf, the final 
 establishment of the Roman Empire, the high- 
 water mark of classical civilization, to the appar¬ 
 ent chaos which followed the successful inroads 
 of the barbarian tribes in the 5th century is 
 long and obscure. But the fact before hinted at 
 of the corruption of the Empire into a mere cen¬ 
 tralized tax-gathering machine is obvious enough 
 to the careful student of history. 
 
 The ancient aristocratic families of the prov¬ 
 inces were, under the name of the Decuriones, 
 made responsible for the taxes, and had the 
 odium of acting as tax-gatherers, their own 
 estates suffering if they failed to obtain the full 
 amount decreed. As the resources of the Empire 
 began tp decline, the central government 
 squeezed so much the harder, and, as before 
 stated, the position of these Decuriones became 
 intolerable, so that they were driven to the whole- 
 
 52 
 
MEDIEVAL SOCIETY 
 
 53 
 
 sale manumission of their slaves. These now 
 became serfs, owing service to their former mas¬ 
 ters, and being the necessary human live-stock of 
 the great estates once owned by those masters. 
 It seems most probable that these necessary cir¬ 
 cumstances, fused with the system of the Teu¬ 
 tonic Mark, gradually produced the Manor, 
 which was the basis of mediaeval economic life. 
 This, of course, only applies to those countries 
 which had been more or less definitely Roman¬ 
 ized. In other non-Romanized lands the serfs 
 were the descendants of the conquered tribe, 
 while the freemen of the conquering tribe, the 
 “gentle-men,” or men of the Gens, were the 
 holders of the land, under some tenure or other. 
 
 The irresistible tendency of the new society, 
 therefore, whatever circumstances it had to deal 
 with, was towards a hierarchial system, under 
 which, while no man was positively owned by 
 another, no man was free of service to another; 
 even the serfs, the lowest rank, had certain 
 rights, the chief of which was the use of a por¬ 
 tion of the Manor; the right of livelihood, in fact, 
 was not withheld from them, in theory at least. 
 
 The theory of the feudal system is an unbroken 
 chain of service from the serf up to the kaiser, 
 and of protection from the kaiser down to the 
 „ serf. It recognized no absolute ownership of 
 land. God was the owner of the earth, the kaiser 
 and his kings were His vicegerents there, who 
 might devolve their authority to their vassals, 
 and they in turn to theirs, and so on till it reached 
 the serf; the difference being in the quality of 
 
54 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 the service, the men of the conquering tribe pay¬ 
 ing none but military duties of some kind, while 
 the serf paid productive labor. Except the right 
 of livelihood guaranteed by custom, the latter 
 had in general no rights, but his lord, neverthe¬ 
 less, was bound to protect him against wrongs 
 from outside. And the theory of the system at 
 least invested the lord with a quasi-religious 
 character. 
 
 The change to this system was much fur¬ 
 thered by the domination of the Teutonic races 
 in Italy, France, and Spain, so that the old 
 Roman, or Roman provincial slave-owning noble, 
 was gradually superseded by the barbarian lord 
 of the manor, who naturally carried with him 
 the custom of the tribe, developing little by little 
 into the complete feudal system. This was helped 
 on by the break-up of the world-market of an¬ 
 cient civilization; which break-up brought about 
 at last conditions under which the land was the 
 only source of livelihood, and, as we have seen, 
 was cultivated mainly for the behoof of the lords 
 by a population of serfs and of tenants in vil- 
 lenage,—although there were everywhere in Teu¬ 
 tonic countries remains of the old holding by the 
 freemen of communal lands. 
 
 As already hinted this hierarchical system 
 w»as mixed up with religious ideas. Accordingly, 
 we find that the Middle Ages had a distinct re¬ 
 ligion of their own, developed from, but by no 
 means identical with, that early Christianity, 
 wjhich was one of the forces that broke up the 
 Roman Empire. As long as that empire lasted 
 
MEDIAEVAL SOCIETY 
 
 55 
 
 in its integrity Christianity was purely individ¬ 
 ualistic; it bade every man do his best for his 
 future in another world, and had no commands 
 to give about the government of this world, ex¬ 
 cept to obey the “powers that be” in non-religious 
 matters, in order to escape troubles and compli¬ 
 cations which might distract the attention of the 
 Christian from the kingdom of God. 
 
 But in mediaeval Christianity, although this 
 idea of individual devotion to the perfection of 
 the next world still existed, it was kept in the 
 background, and was almost dormant, except 
 sporadically (as exemplified by St. Thomas a 
 Kempis, St. Francis, St. Bernard, etc.) in the 
 presence of the idea of the Church. The latter 
 was not merely a link between the earthly and 
 the heavenly kingdoms, but may even be said to 
 have brought the kingdom of heaven to earth by 
 breathing its spirit into the temporal power, 
 which it recognized as another manifestation of 
 its own authority. The struggles between the 
 temporal and the spiritual power, which form so 
 large a part of the history of the Middle Ages, 
 were not the result of any antagonism of ideas 
 between the two, but came of the tendency of 
 one side of the great organization of society to 
 absorb the other, without rejecting its theory. 
 
 In short, on the one hand, the Church was 
 political and social as much as religious, while, 
 on the other, the State was at least as much relig¬ 
 ious, as it was political and social. 
 
 For instance, all the great corporations, which 
 were such a prominent feature of the Middle 
 
56 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 Ages, from the fraternity of knighthood to the 
 guilds of craft, were on the one hand religious 
 institutions, though on the other they were de¬ 
 vised for obvious practical purposes. Again, in 
 both physicians and lawyers a certain religious 
 character was formally recognized, of which 
 some shadow of a memory still exists in their 
 official garments and formulae. 
 
 As an example of the closeness with which 
 this idea of the gradation of ranks for service- 
 protection clung to the religious, as well as to 
 the secular, polity of the Middle Ages, we may 
 cite the Mystery Plays, in which not only heaven 
 and earth are furnished each with its due hier¬ 
 archy, but hell also has a like constitution. The - 
 simple mediaeval man conceived of the universe, 
 it must be remembered, as divided into three 
 parts, heaven above, earth in the midst, and hell 
 below, though this was modified with the more 
 learned by a curious mixture of quasi-Ptolemaic 
 lore. 
 
 But the relations between the feudal lords 
 their vassals and their serfs, as such, only show 
 us one side of the society of the Middle Ages. 
 The tendency to association within that society 
 is one of its most marked features. In fact; 
 nothing could be done in those days without such 
 association. Life seemed impossible to the mediae¬ 
 val mind without common action. All men, as 
 we have seen, both great and small, belonged to 
 the great corporation of the Church; damnation 
 in this world and the next was the only alter¬ 
 native. The ecclesiastics proper, and those spe- 
 
MEDIAEVAL SOCIETY 
 
 57 
 
 cially devoted to the religious life, including those 
 whose business was fighting for the Church, 
 formed themselves into strictly regulated orders. 
 The nobles were bound by the ties of the fra¬ 
 ternity of knighthood in one or other of its 
 forms. 
 
 Production and Exchange were in the hands 
 of great associations formed by traders and 
 craftsmen for protection of commerce and organ¬ 
 ization of industry. 
 
 The mediaeval towns had two origins: first, 
 there was the town, which was a survival of the 
 city of Roman times, and is mostly found in the 
 south of Europe, Italy, Spain, France, etc., 
 although there are examples in Britain and West¬ 
 ern Germany. And next there were the new 
 towns which grew up for reasons of convenience 
 out of the “Mark,” and for the most part be¬ 
 came incorporated into the feudal manorial sys¬ 
 tem. The freemen—that is, the landholders of 
 the mark, formed a municipal aristocracy in 
 these inchoate towns, and from them the gov¬ 
 erning body was chosen. When the towns began 
 to be incorporated through privileges granted to 
 them by their feudal overlord, the old semi-inde¬ 
 pendent inhabitants, who were probably the 
 survival of the conquered tribe, joined to those 
 who had flowed into the town for protection and 
 convenience, formed a population of craftsmen 
 and trader^. Of these, the traders, who fetched 
 and carried wares from the east of Europe, 
 mainly Byzantium, still the centre of organized 
 commerce as in the later Empire, were the most 
 
58 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 important as to position, although very few in 
 numbers. They were the first founders of the 
 Merchant Guild, which, as its name imports, was 
 purely commercial in tendency, although organ¬ 
 ized like all associations of the Middle Ages on 
 quasi-religious grounds, and including some sur¬ 
 vivals of the fellowship of the freemen. A recent 
 work on the Merchant Guild by Mr. Grosse 
 shows conclusively that it was not deduced from 
 the old Frith-gild; neither, on the other hand, 
 was it identical with the corporation of the towns, 
 since non-residents could be members of it, 
 whereas the. members of the corporation (Les 
 Lineages, Geschlechte, Porterey, Ehrbarkeit, 
 Patricians, etc.) were bound to be holders of the 
 lands which were once tribal. 
 
 But the principle of association was sure to 
 have further development amongst the useful 
 classes of the time; as handicraft began to grow 
 in its capacity for production, guilds for the spe¬ 
 cial crafts were founded all over Europe, till they 
 embraced every department of craftsmanship in 
 the widest sense of the word; thus the plough¬ 
 man’s guild was the most important one in the 
 villages and small towns of England. The con¬ 
 stitution of these guilds was strictly on the re¬ 
 ceived model of mediaeval associations, but con¬ 
 cerned itself also with the minutest details of the 
 craft. They were thoroughly recognized legal 
 bodies, having the power of enforcing penalties 
 for the breaking of their special rules; and be¬ 
 fore long they became partakers in the supreme 
 government of the towns, being commonly rep- 
 
MEDIAEVAL SOCIETY 
 
 59 
 
 resented on the corporation by members of their 
 own body. In the later period of the Middle 
 Ages they even went beyond this, and in not a 
 few cases the representatives of the craft-guilds 
 pushed out the original aristocracy, the men of 
 the Lineages, Geschlechte, or Patricians. For 
 example, towards the close of the 15th century, 
 in Zurich, Hans Waldmann, the famous Burger- 
 master of that town, who had originally been a 
 member of the tanner’s guild, on attaining to 
 power, altered the constitution of the executive, 
 which had at first been composed, half of the mu¬ 
 nicipal aristocracy, and half of the guildsmen, 
 and gained a definite perpetual majority for the 
 latter by increasing the proportion of their rep¬ 
 resentatives to two-thirds. Even earlier than this, 
 in the latter half of the 14th century, the ac¬ 
 count given us by Froissart of the famous war 
 of Ghent and its allies against their feudal lord, 
 the Earl of Flanders, shows us that the municipal 
 aristocracy had little power unless backed by the 
 craft-guilds. Wherever in Flanders “the lesser 
 crafts” (i.e. mainly the handicrafts) were pow¬ 
 erful, the corporation had to give way, and take 
 up the war against the Earl; where the “greater 
 crafts” (such as the mariners) had sw^ay, the 
 corporation was able to hold the town for him. 
 
 To sum up, the corporation was the direct 
 descendant of the mark, i.e. the tribal land-hold¬ 
 ing body, and the common tendency was for the 
 craft-guilds to supplant this aristocracy after the 
 Merchant Guilds had been overshadowed by their 
 growing power. We may again mention that 
 
60 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 these corporations and guilds, the industrial asso¬ 
 ciations in short, were accepted as due and legal 
 members of the feudal hierarchy. It is necessary 
 now to take note of the relations between them 
 and the kings and their nobles. 
 
 As soon as feudalism became paramount in 
 Europe, the tribal mark lost its independence, 
 and came under the domination of the baron or 
 lord of the manor, although much of its constitu¬ 
 tion and most of its customs remained intact un¬ 
 der the feudal lordship, 1 as they had done under 
 Roman bureaucracy. As the mark became con¬ 
 solidated into the town, with the land attached 
 thereto, it began to acquire fresh privileges from 
 its new lords, lay and ecclesiastic. These privi¬ 
 leges were for the most part bought from the 
 overlords under the compulsion of the need of 
 money, bred by the wars they were engaged in, 
 or, in the church territories, by the overweening 
 love of splendid building, and the intrigues with 
 Rome and foreign courts in which they were in¬ 
 volved. These privileges consisted mainly of 
 independent jurisdiction, rights of market and 
 tolls, freedom from military service, etc., etc. 
 
 It was the interest of the towns to favor the 
 growth of power in the king or monarch, since 
 he was far off, and his domination was much 
 less real and much less vexatious than that of 
 the feudal neighbour, their immediate lord. The 
 king, on his side, always engaged in disputes with 
 his baronage, found his interest in creating and 
 supporting free corporations in the towns, and 
 
 1 Cf. Gomme’s Village Communities. 
 
MEDIAEVAL SOCIETY 
 
 61 
 
 thereby curbing the overweening power of his 
 vassals; while at the same time the growing pro¬ 
 duction of the towns added to his exchequer, by 
 creating a fresh source of supply, easier to ex¬ 
 ploit than that which the military nobles yielded. 
 
 This process of the gaining of independence of 
 the growing mediaeval towns began as early as 
 the 11th century, and culminated in the 14th. 
 The first English charter was granted by Edward 
 the Confessor. In France the first charter was 
 granted to Le Mans in 1072, to Cambrai 1076; 
 Laon, Beauvais, Amiens, and other towns fol¬ 
 lowed. In later times the kings themselves 
 founded free towns, as notably Edward I., both 
 in Guienne and England; Kingston upon Hull 
 (liodie Hull) and Winchelsea are examples of 
 such places still remaining, though fortune has 
 dealt with these two in such a widely different 
 way. 
 
 In Spain, in quite early days the Visigothic 
 code, a blending of Roman law and Teutonic 
 custom, recognized the corporations definitely: 
 the first charter was granted to Leon in 1020. 
 
 In Germany the towns were in the early Mid¬ 
 dle Ages appanages of the vassals of the Empire, 
 and were governed by the bishops as their vicars: 
 the process of emancipation here was that at first, 
 in the 12th century, the townsmen carried on a 
 government side by side with the bishop, and in 
 the 13th century got rid of him either by pur¬ 
 chase or main force, and so at last reached the 
 goal of holding directly of the Empire. When 
 this was accomplished, they were more com- 
 
62 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 pletely freed than elsewhere in Europe, and en¬ 
 sured their independence by the formation of 
 confederacies of cities, of which the Hanseatic 
 League was the most famous. 
 
 In Flanders, owing to the great development 
 of production by handicraft, the cities, though 
 not theoretically so free, were powerful enough 
 to carry on a struggle with their feudal lord 
 through almost the whole of the 14th century, 
 and were not altogether crushed, even when the 
 battle of Rosebeque and the death of Philip van 
 Artavelde closed the more dramatic phase of 
 that struggle. As an example of the complete¬ 
 ness of the legal recognition of the status of these 
 cities, it may be mentioned that, in the second 
 act of the war with the Earl of Flanders, when 
 the younger Artavelde was entering on the scene, 
 the city of Ghent summoned to its banner certain 
 knights and lords to do it due military feudal 
 service, while these very lords were in the Earl’s 
 camp preparing to do battle against Ghent: but 
 it is clear that the historian recognizes to the full 
 the right of the city in the matter, though he 
 applauds the refusal of the vassals on “gentle¬ 
 manly” grounds. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE ROUGH SIDE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 npHE sketch just concluded of the composition 
 A of society during the Middle Ages by no 
 means accords with the idea of that epoch which 
 still holds its place in the mind of the general 
 public. In spite of the researches and labors of 
 enlightened historians in recent times, such as 
 Hallam in the early part of the century, and, of 
 late years, of men like Green, Freeman, and 
 Stubbs, the representation of the Middle Ages 
 put forward by bourgeois historians, whose aim 
 was the praising of the escape of modern society 
 from a period of mere rapine and confusion, into 
 peace, order, and prosperity, rs generally ac¬ 
 cepted. 
 
 Doubtless there was a rough side to the Mid¬ 
 dle Ages as to every other epoch, but there was 
 also genuine life and progress in them. This, as 
 we have seen, expressed itself on one side in? the 
 hierarchial order of feudal society, which was so 
 far from being lawless that, on the contrary, law 
 received somewhat undue observance therein. 
 And on the other side that there were certain 
 
 63 
 
64 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 compensations to the shortcomings of the epoch, 
 which we shall have to consider before long. 
 
 At present, however, let us look at the rough 
 side of the mediaeval cloth, with the preliminary 
 remark, that those who have drawn so violent a 
 contrast between mediaeval disadvantages and 
 the gains of modern life, have been by nature and 
 circumstances incapable of seeing the compensa¬ 
 tions above-said. 
 
 The shortcomings of the life of the Middle 
 Ages resolve themselves in the main, firstly, to 
 the rudeness of life and absence of material com¬ 
 forts : secondly, to the element of oppression and 
 violence in which men lived; and thirdly, to the 
 ignorance and superstition which veiled so much 
 of our truth from their minds. 
 
 As to the rudeness of life it mu§t be remem¬ 
 bered that men do not suffer from the lack of 
 comforts which they have never had before thefr 
 eyes, and of which they cannot even conceive. 
 Indeed, in our own day, though we can conceive 
 that flying would be a pleasanter method of pro¬ 
 gression than an express train, nevertheless we are 
 not made unhappy by the fact of our not being 
 able to fiy. The sensitiveness of men adapts 
 itself easily to their surrounding conditions, and 
 such inconveniences as may exist in these are not 
 felt by those who consider them unavoidable. It 
 is true that this argument can only be put for¬ 
 ward when the shortcomings are not of a nature 
 to degrade those who have to bear them; but it 
 must be admitted that there is no degradation 
 in mere external roughness of life. For the rest, 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 65 
 
 though it be a shock for the modern man to be 
 transplanted, without preparation, into mediaeval 
 conditions, the mediaeval man in his turn would 
 probably be as ill at ease amid the “comforts” 
 of modern London. 
 
 Another consideration is far more serious than 
 this, and far more calculated to shake our com¬ 
 placency in modern civilization, to-wit: that what¬ 
 ever advantages we have gained over the Middle 
 Ages are not shared by the greater part of our 
 population. The whole of our unskilled labor¬ 
 ing classes are in a far worse position as to food, 
 housing, and clothing than any but the extreme 
 fringe of the corresponding class in the Middle 
 Ages. 
 
 Let us look next at the ignorance and super¬ 
 stition of the Middle Ages. In the main this 
 ignorance meant a naivete in their conceptions of 
 the universe which was partly a survival of the 
 animism of the earlier world. The ignorance was 
 not a matter of brutal choice; on the contrary, 
 there was a keen and disinterested search after 
 truth and knowledge: and the very fact of the 
 region of discovery being so unknown added the 
 charm of wonder and scientific imagination to the 
 research. Nor should it be forgotten that what 
 to us has become superstition was to them science, 
 and that in all probability our science will be 
 the superstition of future times. It is being 
 acknowledged every day that modern accepted 
 scientific explanations of the “nature of things” 
 are becoming more and more inadequate to the 
 satisfaction of true knowledge. The Ptolemaic 
 
66 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 theory of astronomy was good enough for the 
 data of its day; and though it has been super¬ 
 seded by the Copernican system, that in its 
 turn is limited as an explantaion by the present 
 condition of our knoweldge of the universe. 
 Though the world will never go back to Ptolemy’s 
 explanation, it will go forward to something 
 more complete than any yet put forth. 
 
 There remains the charge of violence and 
 misery to be dealt with. As ,to the misery, 
 the result partly of that violence and partly of 
 the deficient grasp of the resources of nature, 
 its manifestations were so much more dramatic 
 than the misery of our time produces, that at 
 this distance they have the effect of over-shadow¬ 
 ing the everyday life of the period, which in 
 fact was not constantly burdened by them. What 
 misery exists in our own days is not spasmodic 
 and accidental, but chronic and essential to the 
 system under which we live. The well-to-do 
 bourgeois of the nineteenth century may indeed 
 make light of this misery, while he shudders at 
 the horrors of torture, and sack, and massacre 
 of the Middle Ages, because he does not feel 
 the modern misery in his own person: but the 
 proletarian of our commercial age, though he 
 be hardened to bear his lot, is not only degraded 
 by the constant pressure of sordid troubles, but 
 cannot fail to note the contrast which every hour 
 thrusts before his eyes between that lot and the 
 easy life of his masters—the possessing classes. 
 In mediaeval times the violence and suffering did 
 not spare one class and fall wholly upon an- 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 67 
 
 other, the most numerous in the community. 
 Even the king’s person was found by many ex¬ 
 amples to be by no means sacred: “Strike the 
 lords and spare the commons” was the cry that 
 went up in the chase of the bloody battles of the 
 Roses. The unsuccessful politician did not retire 
 to the ease and pleasure of a country house, 
 flavored with a little literary labor and apolo¬ 
 getics for his past mistakes, but paid with his 
 head, or the torment of his body, for his mis¬ 
 calculations as to possible majorities. 
 
 Furthermore, the very roughness and adven¬ 
 ture of life of those days made people less sensi¬ 
 tive to bodily pain than they are now. Their 
 nerves were not so high-strung as ours are, so 
 that the apprehension of torture or death did 
 not weigh heavily upon them. Of this history 
 affords abundant evidence. 
 
 Death, moreover, to' them seemed but a tempo¬ 
 rary interruption of the course of their life. Men 
 in those days really conceived of the continuity 
 of life as a simple and absolute fact. The belief 
 in a future state had not as yet become a mere 
 vague and metaphorical expression, as it is to¬ 
 day, when no one attempts even in thought to 
 realize it for himself; it was as real to them as 
 palpable everyday matters. In this it will be 
 evident that it was different from the spiritual¬ 
 ized belief in a union with God or Christ which 
 seems to have animated the early Christian, and 
 which survived in some of the mediaeval saints 
 and mystics, such as St. Francis and St. Cather¬ 
 ine of Siena. 
 
68 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 In short it is clear that such misery as existed 
 in the Middle Ages was different in essence from 
 that of our times; one piece of evidence alone 
 forces this conclusion upon us: the Middle Ages 
 were essentially the epoch of Popular Art, the 
 art of the people; whatever were the conditions 
 of the life of the time, they produced an enormous 
 volume of visible and tangible beauty, even taken 
 per se, and still more extraordinary when consid¬ 
 ered beside the sparse population of those ages. 
 The “misery” from amidst of which this came, 
 whatever it was, must have been something 
 totally unlike, and surely far less degrading than 
 the misery of modern Whitechapel, from'which 
 not even the faintest scintilla of art can be 
 struck, in spite of the idealizing of slum life by 
 the modern philanthropic sentimentalist and his 
 allies, the impressionist novelist and painter. 
 
 We have thought it necessary to meet objec¬ 
 tions as to over-valuing the importance of the 
 Middle Ages, but it must be understood that 
 we do not stand forward as apologists for them 
 except in relation to modern times. The part 
 which they played in the course of history was 
 not only necessary to the development of the life 
 of the world, but was so special and characteristic 
 that it will leave its mark on future ages in spite 
 of the ignorant contemplation of them from 
 which we are slowly emerging. They had their 
 own faults and miseries, their own uses and 
 advantages, and they left behind them works to 
 show that at least happiness and cheerful intel¬ 
 ligence were possible sometimes and somewhere 
 

 THE MIDDLE AGES 69 
 
 in them, even amongst that working class, which 
 now has to bear the whole burden of our follies 
 and mistakes. 
 
 
4 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 DY about the year 1350 the crafts-guilds re¬ 
 ceived all the development possible to them 
 as societies of freemen and equals; and that date 
 may conveniently be accepted as the end of the 
 first part of the Middle Ages. 
 
 By this time serfdom generally was beginning 
 to yield to the change introduced by the guilds 
 and free towns: the field serfs partly drifted into 
 the cities, and became affiliated to the guilds, and 
 partly became free men, though living on lands 
 whose tenure was unfree. This movement to¬ 
 wards the break-up of serfdom is marked by 
 the Peasants’ War in England, led by Wat Tyler 
 and John Ball in Kent, and by John Lister (dyer) 
 in East Anglia, which was the answer of the 
 combined yeomen, emancipated and unemanci¬ 
 pated serfs, to the attempt of the nobles to 
 check the movement. 
 
 But the development of the craft-guilds and 
 the flocking of the freed serfs into the towns 
 laid the foundations for another change in indus¬ 
 trialism: with the second part of the mediaeval 
 period appears the journeyman, or so-called free 
 
 70 * 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 n 
 
 laborer. Besides the craftsmaster and his ap¬ 
 prentices, the workshop now has these “free la¬ 
 borers” in it—unprivileged workmen, that is, who 
 are nevertheless under the domination of the 
 guild, and compelled to affiliation with it. But 
 so completely was the idea of association innate 
 in mediaeval life that even this first step towards 
 disruption came for a time under the guild-influ¬ 
 ence: in Germany especially, the guilds of jour¬ 
 neymen were so important as to form a complete 
 network through all central Europe. The jour¬ 
 neyman if he presented himself before the guild 
 in any town was taken charge of, and livelihood 
 and employment found for him. In England 
 the attempt at founding journeymen-guilds had 
 little success, probably because it came too late. 
 
 After this guildsmen began to be privileged 
 workmen; and with them began the foundation 
 of the present middle-class, whose development 
 from this source went on to meet its other de¬ 
 velopment on the side of trade which was now 
 becoming noticeable. In 1453 Constantinople 
 was taken by the Turks, and as a consequence 
 Greek manuscripts were being discovered and 
 read; a thirst for new or revived learning out¬ 
 side the superstitions of the mediaeval church, 
 and the quaint, curiously perverted, and half 
 understood remains of popular traditions, was 
 arising. The new art of printing began to spread 
 with marvelous rapidity from about the year 
 1470; and all was getting ready^ for the trans¬ 
 formation of mediaeval into modern or commer¬ 
 cial society. 
 
72 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 Before the beginning of the sixteenth century 
 the craft-guilds had gradually reduced the oth¬ 
 ers to insignificance, but the spirit in which they 
 were founded was dying out in the meantime. 
 They were originally societies of equal crafts¬ 
 men governed by officers of their own choice, and 
 their rules were obviously directed against the 
 growth of capitalism, as e. g., those of the cloth¬ 
 iers of Flanders, which limited the number of 
 looms in any master’s shop to four. Inferiority 
 in the guild was only temporary; every appren¬ 
 tice, or bachelor, was bound to become a master 
 in time. But now this had been changing, for 
 some while, and the journeyman made his ap¬ 
 pearance in the workshops under the name of 
 servant. The entrance-fee increased so much 
 that it is clear that it denotes more than the 
 mere fall in the value of gold, and meant the 
 buying of a share in a monopolist company rather 
 than the necessary contribution to a craftsman’s 
 society. In short, by the middle of the sixteenth 
 century the guilds were organizations including 
 somewhat more than the germs of capital served 
 by labor; nothing more was needed than external 
 circumstances for the development from this of 
 complete capitalistic privilege. 
 
 Apart from the guilds, the two classes of capi¬ 
 talists and free workmen were being created by 
 the development of commerce, which needed them 
 both as instruments for her progress. Mediaeval 
 commerce knew nothing of capitalistic exchange; 
 the demands of local markets were supplied by 
 the direct barter or sale of the superfluity of 
 
 v 
 
73 
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 V 
 
 the produce of the various districts and coun¬ 
 tries. All this was now being changed, and a 
 world-market was being formed, into which all 
 commodities had to pass and a mercantile class 
 grew up for the carrying on of this new com¬ 
 merce, and soon attained to power, amid the 
 rapid break-up of the old hierarchical society 
 with its duly ordered grades. 
 
 The fall of Constantinople was followed in 
 thirty years by the discovery of America, and 
 about the same time of the Cape passage, which 
 ultimately superseded the old trade route over¬ 
 land by the Levant and the Bavarian cities. 
 And now the Mediterranean was no longer the 
 great commercial sea, with nothing beyond it but 
 a few outlying stations. The cities of Central 
 Europe— e. g., Augsburg, Nuremberg, Munich, 
 and the Hanse towns—were now sharing the 
 market with Venice and Genoa, the children of 
 Constantinople: there was no longer one great 
 commanding city in Europe. But it was not 
 only the rise in the commercial towns that was 
 overturning feudal society. As they conquered 
 their enemy, the feudal nobles, they fell into the 
 clutches of bureaucratic monarchs, who either 
 seized on them for their own possessions, or used 
 them as tools for their projects of conquest 
 and centralization. Charles V., e. g., played this 
 game through South Germany, Austria, and the 
 Netherlands, and with Venice, under cover of the 
 so-called “Holy Roman Empire,” while at the 
 same time he had fallen into possession of Spain 
 by marriage; and disregarding his sham feudal 
 
74 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 empire, he bent all his efforts into turning these 
 countries into real bureaucratic states. In France 
 the liberties of the towns were crushed out by 
 Louis XI. and his successors. In England the 
 plunder of the religious houses enabled Henry 
 VIII. to found a new nobility, subservient to his 
 own absolutism, in place of the ancient feudal 
 nobility destroyed by their late civil war. 
 
 Everywhere the modern centralized bureau¬ 
 cratic nation was being developed. In France 
 the long and fierce wars of the Burgundian and 
 Armagnac factions gave opportunity for the con¬ 
 solidation of the monarchy, at last effected, as 
 above said by Louis XI., the forerunner of the 
 most successful king of France and the last suc¬ 
 cessful one—Louis XIV. In England the Wars 
 of the Roses were not so bitter as the French 
 wars, and the people took small part in them, 
 except as vassals or retainers of the households 
 of the contending nobles; but they nevertheless 
 played their part in the disruption of feudality, 
 not only by the thinning-out of the nobles slain 
 in battle or on the scaffold, but also by helping 
 directly to draw England into the world-market. 
 
 Under the mediaeval system the workmen, op¬ 
 pressed and protected by the lords of the manor 
 and the guilds, were not available for the needs 
 of commerce. The serfs ate up the part of the 
 produce spared them by their lords; the guild 
 craftsmen sold the produce of their own hands 
 to their neighbors without the help of a middle¬ 
 man. In neither case was there anything left 
 over for the supply of a great market. 
 
THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 75 
 
 But England, one of the best pasture countries 
 of the world, had in her even then capacities for 
 profit-grinding, if the tillage system of the manor 
 and the yoeman’s holdings could be got rid of. 
 The landowners, ruined by their long war, saw 
 the demand for English wool, and set themselves 
 to the task of helping evolution with much of 
 the vigor and unscrupulous pettifogging which 
 has since won for their race the temporary com¬ 
 mand of the world-market. The tenants were 
 rack-rented, the yoemen were expropriated, the 
 hinds were driven off the land into the towns, 
 there to work as “free” laborers. England thus 
 contributed her share to commerce, paying for 
 it with nothing more important than the loss of 
 the rough joviality, plenty, and independence of 
 spirit, which once attracted the admiration of 
 foreigners more crushed by the feudal system 
 and by its abuses than were the English. 
 
 f 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION 
 
 r | 'HUS all over Europe commercialism was 
 rising. New needs were being discovered 
 by men who were gaining fresh mastery over 
 nature, and were set free from old restraints to 
 struggle for individual pre-eminence. A fresh 
 intelligence and mental energy was shedding its 
 light over the more sordid side of the period of 
 change. The study of the Greek literature at 
 first hand was aiding this new intelligence among 
 cultivated men, and also, since they did but half 
 understand its spirit, was warping their minds 
 into fresh error. For the science of history and 
 the critical observation of events had not yet 
 been born; and to the ardent spirits of the 
 Renaissance, there had never been but two peo¬ 
 ples worth notice—to-wit, the Greeks and Ro¬ 
 mans, whom their new disciples strove to imi¬ 
 tate in every thing which was deemed of im¬ 
 portance at the time. 
 
 Now also, as at all periods of intellectual fer¬ 
 ment, Occultism, that is the magical concep¬ 
 tion of nature, obtained a numerous following. 
 This, of course, was partly the result of the study 
 
 76 
 
RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 
 
 77 
 
 of the recently-discovered writings of the last 
 period of transition,—that of the early Christian 
 centuries, — the Neo-Platonic and other Her¬ 
 metic literature, joined to the fact that science, 
 in the modern acceptation of the word, was in 
 its first dawning. The science of the Renais¬ 
 sance is mainly a systematization of mediaeval 
 traditional science, with an admixture of the 
 later classical and oriental theories, to which 
 no doubt is added a certain amount of the re¬ 
 sults of genuine observation. It is represented 
 by such men as Paracelsus, Nostradamus, and 
 Cornelius Agrippa, and, we may add, by the 
 mythical Dr. Faustus. 
 
 Amidst all this it is clear that the old religion 
 would no longer serve the new spirit of the 
 times. The mediaeval church, the kingdom of 
 heaven on earth, in full sympathy with the tem¬ 
 poral hierarchy, in which also every one had his 
 divinely appointed place, and which restricted 
 commerce and forbade usury, such was no reli¬ 
 gion for the new commercialism; the latter’s 
 creed must have nothing to do with the busi¬ 
 ness of this world; so the individualist ethics 
 of early Christianity, which had been kept in 
 the background during the period of the me¬ 
 diaeval church, were once more brought to the 
 front, and took the place of the corporate ethics 
 of that church, of which each one of the “faith¬ 
 ful” was but a part. 
 
 A new form of Christianity, therefore, had to 
 be found to suit the needs of the new Europe 
 which was being born: but this adaptation of 
 
 l 
 
78 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 Christianity took two shapes, so widely different 
 from each other that they have usually been op¬ 
 posed as contrasting- religions, which is an in¬ 
 accurate view to take of the matter, since they 
 are but two sides of the same shield. 
 
 These two forms were Protestantism and 
 modern or Jesuitised Catholicism j the prota¬ 
 gonists of either side being nameable as Martin 
 Luther and Ignatius Loyala. Almost the whole 
 Teutonic race adopted Protestanism in one or 
 other of its forms, and the leading men among 
 them accepted its teachings with depth and sin¬ 
 cerity: amongst the Latinized nations it made 
 no real progress, and wherever it gained many 
 adherents, as in the case of the French Hugue¬ 
 nots, it was little more than a political badge. 
 It is worthy of remark, too, that, at the present 
 day, in Geneva, the city of Calvin, which is 
 really a French city, the Catholics considerably 
 outnumber the Protestants. It may be noted, 
 as showing the real strength of the Protestant 
 feeling in the north of Europe, that in those 
 countries where the religious struggle was most 
 severe—as in Scotland, England, Holland, and 
 Switzerland—the quality that finally predomi¬ 
 nated made the form of religion the furthest re¬ 
 moved from mediaeval Catholicism: while in 
 places where the Reformation made itself , so to 
 say, as in Scandinavia and the north of Germany, 
 the outward change was comparatively slight. 
 
 The Protestant Puritanism which is even yet 
 so strong in these islands, has no analogue in the 
 Protestantism of the rest of Europe, but is a 
 
RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 
 
 79 
 
 strange isolated fact, the result probably of some 
 qualities inherent in the population, and de¬ 
 veloped by circumstances: indeed there are 
 traces of it discoverable in mediaeval England, 
 and that not amongst the Lollards only; and it 
 must be confessed that the origin of this spirit 
 is as obscure as the fact of its existence is bane¬ 
 ful. Its long-enduring and deep-seated strength 
 may be gauged by the success that always at¬ 
 tends appeals made to it in the present day by 
 time-serving politicians and popularity- hunting 
 journalists. 1 
 
 Modern Catholicism, as above said, is per¬ 
 sonally represented by Ignatius Loyala, whose 
 order of Jesus practically changed the whole 
 face of the religion. Mediaeval Catholicism was 
 the natural growth of that simple and naive con¬ 
 ception of the universe which we have com¬ 
 mented on before, and a member of the church 
 - of the Middle Ages was always surrounded by 
 the sense of his membership, and could not step 
 out of it in the performance of the ordinary 
 acts of his life. Protestantism was a recrudes¬ 
 cence of the individualist religion of early Chris¬ 
 tianity. Jesuitical Catholicism, while retaining 
 all the old mediaeval forms, was really more akin 
 to the Protestantism of the times which had 
 created both. It was no growth of the ages, but 
 a product of the necessities of the ecclesiasticism 
 of the Renaissance. The humanist learning of 
 
 1 Cf. the case of the late Mr. Parnell, overthrown by 
 it in the very hour of his triumph. 
 
80 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 the period, which at first disregarded Chris¬ 
 tianity altogether, passed in the end into this 
 Jesuitised, casuistical form of Christianity; and 
 it must be noted here that the education of 
 Catholic countries in the centuries that followed 
 the Reformation fell almost entirely into the hands 
 of the Jesuits. It is true that the missions car¬ 
 ried on amongst barbarous peoples by the Order, 
 so famous for their complete organization, and 
 the unshrinking devotion of the brethren, were 
 also distinguished by the humanity of their 
 treatment of these peoples, and offer a strong 
 contrast to the brutality of the commercial bu¬ 
 reaucracies and their buccaneering fringes. Yet 
 though they showed the good side of the change 
 from mediaeval to modern life, the end of their 
 powerful organization was the establishment of 
 that spirit of commercial society to which both 
 this modified Catholicism and the so-called Re¬ 
 formed religions were but adjuncts. It is sig¬ 
 nificant that they carefully abstained from fol¬ 
 lowing- the example of the mediaeval church in 
 condemning the grosser forms of commerce such 
 as usury; and, in short, their religion, like that 
 of the Protestants, was not of this world. Hence 
 they were essentially allies of the rising bureau¬ 
 cratic system in equal measure with their op¬ 
 ponents. 
 
 As regards politics, Charles V. is the person¬ 
 ality representing the great change on that side 
 of things. The welding of Spain into a nation, 
 begun under Ferdinand and Isabella, the con¬ 
 querors of Granada, was accomplished by him. 
 
RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 
 
 81 
 
 Under the pressure of his attempts to unify 
 Germany in the same manner, the rulers of the 
 great territories, the princes of the Empire, con¬ 
 solidated their lands, and turned them from 
 feudal domains into political nations, as Prussia, 
 Brunswick, Saxony, Bavaria, Brandenburg, 
 Hesse, Cassel, Wurtemberg, and others of less 
 importance. 
 
 Charles V.’s rival, Francis I., continued the 
 consolidation of the French kingdom, begun 
 with such vigor, astuteness, and consequent suc¬ 
 cess, by Louis XI. In England the Tudor mon¬ 
 archy put the last touch to the creation of a po¬ 
 litical nation, under the cover of the strange 
 phantasm of the divine right of kings,—so con¬ 
 trary to the mediaeval idea of the responsibility 
 of the king to the feudal hierarchy in general,— 
 which seems to have been partly the outcome 
 of the Puritan worship of the Old Testament 
 with its despotic oriental principles. 
 
 All this meant the crushing out of the old 
 feudal vassals, the creation of a fresh nobility 
 wholly dependent on the king, mere courtiers 
 waiting on his person, or functionaries appointed 
 to manage his estate; for the new political na¬ 
 tion was regarded as the property of the king, 
 who no longer owned any responsibility to any 
 one, as a king, not even to his God. 
 
 All this change, ecclesiastical and civil, was 
 not accomplished without a certain amount of 
 protest in the form of direct revolt, the most 
 noteworthy event of which was the Peasant War 
 in Germany (1525-1526). At this time, through- 
 
82 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 out Europe, the increase in luxury drove the 
 lords of the land to harsher exactions than ever 
 for the procuring of money for dealing with 
 the merchants, and the usurer grew in im¬ 
 portance at the same time. Against this oppres¬ 
 sion there rose, and spread with extraordinary 
 rapidity (at the above-mentioned date), an in¬ 
 surrection more widespread than any previous 
 revolts of the Middle Ages, one of the leading 
 figures in which was Thomas Munzer. He put 
 forward a sort of mystical commission, which 
 proclaimed the brotherhood of Christians, and 
 the economical and social equality of all men. 
 His doctrines were widely accepted, but he was, 
 after some weeks of power, defeated, and exe¬ 
 cuted near Miilhausen (in Turingia) in 1525. 
 It must be said, however, that there was more 
 than one strain in the Peasant War. The great 
 princes of the Empire, under cover of suppres¬ 
 sion of the rebels, sought to consolidate their 
 power, and to complete the subjugation of the 
 smaller feudal nobility, “the knighthood/’ These 
 had had their last champion in the celebrated 
 Ulric von Hutten, who, amidst a life of roman¬ 
 tic adventure and studious occupation, attacked 
 the higher nobles with the full power of his liter¬ 
 ary genius, and worked hard on the side of the 
 knights under the leadership of Franz von Sick- 
 ingen in 1522-1523. The princes triumphed, 
 and therewith the political side of mediaeval 
 Germany came to an end. As for Munzer, he may 
 be considered as the precursor of the later Ana¬ 
 baptist revolt; for the movement in which he 
 
RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION 83 
 
 worked, after this collapse, sprang up again, 
 and, continuing in an underground manner, cul¬ 
 minated at last in the Anabaptist rising under 
 John of Leyden, the last act of which was the 
 siege and capture of Munster, and the massacre 
 of the rebels in that city. 
 
 The religious wars of France, and the revolt 
 of the Huguenots against the reigning monarchs, 
 can hardly be brought within the category of 
 these popular movements; but were rather con¬ 
 tests between factions, neither of whom had 
 really any special principles to maintain. 
 
 In England a series of revolts took place dur¬ 
 ing the reigns of the last two Henries, and into 
 the reign of Elizabeth, which were mostly di¬ 
 rected against fiscal oppression, the necessary 
 result of the new bureaucratic rule. The most 
 important of these was that led by Kett in Nor¬ 
 folk. They were one and all put down with 
 various degrees of wholesale massacre and 
 cruelty. 
 
 The middle of the sixteenth century, therefore, 
 brings us to this, that the animating spirit of 
 feudal society is dead, though its forms still ex¬ 
 ist, and are used for its own purposes by the 
 bureaucratic system, which has now supplanted 
 feudalism throughout the length and breadth 
 of Europe. This must be considered as the be¬ 
 ginning of the first period of modern History. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 MODERN SOCIETY: EARLY STAGES 
 
 T>Y the opening of the seventeenth century 
 the centralizing bureaucratic monarchies 
 were fairly established: nay, in France at least, 
 they were even showing the birth of modern 
 party-government, which since—carried on, in¬ 
 deed, under the veil of constitutionalism—has 
 been the type of all modern government. Riche¬ 
 lieu—the Bismarck of his time and country— 
 begins the series of prime ministers or real tem¬ 
 porary kings, who govern in the interest of class 
 society, not much encumbered and a good deal 
 protected by their cloaks, the hereditary sham- 
 kings. In England this prime-ministership was 
 more incomplete, though men like Burleigh 
 approached the type. Elizabeth reduced the Tu¬ 
 dor monarchy to an absurdity, a very burlesque 
 of monarchy, under which flourished rankly an 
 utterly unprincipled and corrupt struggle for the 
 satisfaction of individual ambition and greed. 
 This grew still more rankly, perhaps, under 
 James I., who added abject cowardice to all the 
 other vices which are more common to arbitrary 
 high place and power. 
 
MODERN SOCIETY 
 
 85 
 
 As to the condition of the people during the 
 latter years of the sixteenth and beginning of 
 the seventeenth century, the economical and reli¬ 
 gious revolution which had taken place had op¬ 
 pressed them terribly, and the “free workman” 
 had to feel the full force of the causes which 
 had presented him with his “freedom” in the in¬ 
 terest of growing commerce. In England, on 
 the one hand, the expropriation of the yoemanry 
 from the land and the conversion of tillage into 
 pasture had provided a large population of these 
 free laborers, who, on the other hand, were not 
 speedily worked up by the still scanty manu¬ 
 factures of the country, but made a sort of semi¬ 
 vagabond population, troublesome enough to the 
 upper and middle classes. The laws made against 
 such paupers in the time of Henry VIII. and 
 Edward VI. were absolutely ferocious, and men 
 were hanged out of the way by the thousand. 
 
 But in the reign of Elizabeth it was found out 
 that even this was not enough to cure the evil, 
 which of course had been much aggravated by 
 the suppression of the religious houses, part of 
 whose function was the housing and feeding of 
 any part of the workmen temporarily displaced. 
 A Poor Law, therefore, was passed (1601) for 
 dealing with this misery, and, strange to say, it 
 was far more humane than might have been ex¬ 
 pected from the way in which the poor had been 
 dealt with up to that time; so much so, indeed, 
 that the utilitarian philanthropists of the begin¬ 
 ning of this century felt themselves obliged to 
 deal with it in a drastic way, which left us a 
 
86 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 Poor Law as inhumane as could well be. To¬ 
 ward the middle of the seventeenth century 
 things began to improve with our working popu¬ 
 lation: the growth of the towns stimulated agri¬ 
 culture, and tillage began to revive again, though 
 of course under the new system of cultivation 
 for profit. Matters were in fact settling down, 
 and preparing the country by a time of some¬ 
 thing like prosperity for the new revolution in 
 industry. 1 
 
 The condition of the people was on the whole 
 worse on the Continent than in England. Serf¬ 
 dom was by no means extinct in France, Hun¬ 
 gary, or Germany, and that serfdom was far 
 more burdensome and searching side by side 
 with the exploitation of the market than it had 
 been in the feudal period. Other survivals of 
 the mediaeval epoch there were also—thus in Ger¬ 
 many the guilds had still some life and power, 
 and the people were not utterly divorced from 
 the land as in England, although the predomi¬ 
 nant competition of the markets destroyed much 
 of the good that lingered in these half-extinct 
 customs. At the same time the populations were 
 crushed by the frightful wars which passed over 
 them—in all which religion was the immediate 
 excuse. 
 
 The first of this series was the war carried on 
 in Holland and the Netherlands against the 
 Catholic foreigners—the Spaniards—into whose 
 
 1 For a fuller exposition of this period Hyndman's 
 Historical Basis of Socialism in England may be con¬ 
 sulted. 
 
MODERN SOCIETY 
 
 87 
 
 hands they had been thrown by the family af¬ 
 fairs of the house of Austria. Although noble¬ 
 men took up the side of the rebels— e. S- Eg- 
 mont and Horn, executed for so doing—this 
 war was in the main a war of the bourgeois de¬ 
 mocracy on behalf of Protestantism, embittered 
 by the feeling of a Teutonic race against a Lat¬ 
 inized one. There is to be found in it even some 
 foretaste of the revolutionary' sanscullote ele¬ 
 ment, as shown by the eagerness with which the 
 rebels took up the nickname of gueux, or beg¬ 
 gars, flung at them in scorn by their foes, as 
 well as by the extreme bitterness of the ruder 
 sea-faring population, the men whose hats bore 
 the inscription, “Better Turk than Pope.” 
 
 In Germany the struggle known as the 
 “Thirty Years’ War” was between the two op¬ 
 posing parties amongst the great vassals of the 
 German Empire, whose power was used for the 
 aggrandisement of the house of Austria, and 
 also for the enforcement of Catholicism on the 
 more northern countries. The reader must not 
 forget, moreover, that these countries were to 
 the full as oppressively governed as those which 
 obeyed the bidding of the emperor. This miser¬ 
 able war, after inflicting the most terrible suf¬ 
 fering on the unhappy people, who were through¬ 
 out treated with far less mercy and considera¬ 
 tion than if they had been beasts, after having 
 crushed the rising intelligence of Germany into 
 a condition from which it has only arisen in 
 days close to our own, dribbled out in a miserable 
 and aimless manner, leaving the limits of 
 
88 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 Protestant and Catholic pretty much where it 
 had found them; but it also left the people quite 
 defenceless against their masters, the bureau¬ 
 cratic kings and princes. 
 
 In France the religious struggle took a very 
 bitter form, but it was far more political than in 
 Germany. The leaders were even prepared to 
 change their creed when driven into a corner— 
 as Henry of Navarre at the time of the Massacre 
 of St. Bartholomew. In France the popular 
 sympathy was by no means in favor of Protest¬ 
 antism : the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, which 
 inflicted such a terrible blow on the Huguenot 
 cause, would otherwise have been hardly pos¬ 
 sible. It is true that the great Huguenot leader, 
 Henry of Navarre, became king of France, but 
 his accession, the result of his personal genius, 
 did not carry with it a Huguenot triumph as a 
 consequence. Henry had to abjure Protestanism, 
 —a Protestant King of France was impossible. 
 
 The great struggle in England came later, and 
 probably in consequence the victory was more 
 decided on the Puritan side. The enthusiasm 
 with which Mary Tudor—“Bloody Mary”— was 
 received, and the Catholic insurrections in the 
 reign of her successor, show that there was at 
 first some popular feeling on the Catholic side; 
 but by the time of James I., Catholicism was 
 practically dead in England. 1 The Book of 
 
 1 Yet the curious countryman’s book called the Shep¬ 
 herd's Calendar, translated and printed here first about 
 1520, was reprinted literally, with all its Catholic pray¬ 
 ers, etc., several times as late as 1656. 
 
MODERN SOCIETY 
 
 89 
 
 Sports issued by his Government, which en¬ 
 couraged the people to play various games on 
 Sunday after the fashion of the Middle Ages, 
 was widely received as an outrage on the feel¬ 
 ings of the growing middle class in town and 
 country. We have here the first manifestation 
 of that curious Sabbatarianism, which seems to 
 be confined to these islands, and the origin of 
 which is very obscure, since the original Cal- 
 vanists, such as John Knox, and even Calvin 
 himself, were not enthralled by it. 
 
 The maritime power of England has its be¬ 
 ginning in the later Tudor period in contrast 
 to the Middle Ages, when seafaring matters were 
 of little national importance in England, the car¬ 
 rying of the northern seas being almost entirely 
 in the hands of the Flemings and the Hausers. 
 But under Elizabeth the English seamen, gentle¬ 
 men adventurers and merchants, stimulated by 
 the discovery of America, the prosiac accounts 
 of practical money-getting, and the legends of 
 fabulous wealth that there awaited the fearless 
 and boundless greed of the new knight-errantry 
 of the commerce, fitted out ships for filibuster¬ 
 ing expeditions to the New World. They prac¬ 
 tically went to war on their own account with 
 the Spaniards in that hemisphere; and there 
 their reckless courage and superior seamanship 
 won for them pretty much all the wealth which 
 was not fabulous, and laid the foundation of the 
 commercial enterprise of England. By this they 
 converted a people once jovial, indolent, and 
 generous into a nation of sordid, if energetic 
 
90 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 traders and restless money-getters, whose very 
 courage was the courage of the counting-house, 
 and the greater part of this was exercised vi¬ 
 cariously at the expense of their hard-living em¬ 
 ployes by land and sea. 
 
 All was tending towards the irreconcilable 
 quarrel which took place in the next reign be¬ 
 tween the court and the bourgeoisie, and which 
 was nearly as much religious as political. 
 
 Meantime in France the last remnants of the 
 old feudalism struggled in the party warfare of 
 the “Fronde” against Mazarin and his bureau¬ 
 cracy of simple corruption. Finally Louis XIV. 
 put the coping-stone on the French monarchy 
 by forcing his nobility, high and low, into the 
 position of his courtiers, while his minister Col¬ 
 bert developed the kingdom as a tax-gathering 
 machine by the care and talent with which he 
 fostered the manufactures of France, just before 
 his time at a very low ebb indeed. There was no 
 need, therefore, to touch the revenues of the no¬ 
 bility, who were free to spend them in dancing 
 attendance on the court; nay, were not free to 
 do otherwise. The century began with the 
 French monarchy triumphant over all its great 
 vassals; it finished by reducing all its vassals* 
 great and small, to the condition of courtiers, 
 with little influence in the country-side, and di¬ 
 minished rents—mere absentee landlords of the 
 worst type, endowed with the privileges which 
 could only be exercised at the cost of the starva¬ 
 tion of the people, and the exasperation of the 
 bourgeoisie, who furnished the funds for the 
 court glory. 
 

 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION-ENGLAND 
 
 T\7’E must here say a few words about the 
 meaning of the great struggle which 
 took place in England between the King and the 
 Parliament. The King, Charles I., aimed at 
 completing the monarchial absolutism begun by 
 the Tudors, while at the same time his course 
 was clearer to him, because the old feud between 
 nobles and King had quite died out, and, as be¬ 
 fore said, the nobles, from being powerful and 
 often refractory feudal vassals, had become mere 
 courtiers whose aims and interest were identified 
 with those of the monarch. On the other side 
 stood the bourgeoisie, who had thriven enor¬ 
 mously on the growing commerce, were becom¬ 
 ing powerful, and aiming not merely at social 
 and economical freedom, but also at supremacy 
 in the State. To the bourgeoisie also adhered 
 the yeomen and the major part of the country 
 squires, to which group Cromwell himself be¬ 
 longed. 
 
 The struggle began on the Parliamentary side 
 with the assertion of the rights of Parliament, 
 and the profession of an almost pedantic devo- 
 
 91 
 
92 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 tion to the quasi-historical constitution, which 
 was, nevertheless, in the main a figment of the 
 period. Perhaps the most constitutional act of 
 the rebels was the trial of the King for his life, 
 one precedent, at least, for which existed in the 
 condemnation of Edward II. But as the Par¬ 
 liamentary struggle gave place to civil war, and 
 it became clear that the rebels would be worsted 
 unless the bourgeoisie were given the leading 
 part, this sham-historical constitutionalism gave 
 place first to republicanism, with an infusion of 
 theocracy, and finally to the dictatorship of the 
 victorious general, who in the end could scarcely 
 brook the thin veil of the nominally independent 
 Parliament. The effects of the disappointment 
 of the purist republicans, like Colonel Hutchin¬ 
 son, were sternly repressed, and still more so the 
 little spurts of rebellion tried by the religious 
 enthusiasts, amongst whom we must count the 
 Levellers, whose doctrines included a commis¬ 
 sion of a similar character to that put forward by 
 John of Leyden in the first half of the sixteenth 
 century. 
 
 It is worth noting, as illustrating the growth 
 of a widespread Puritanism in England, which 
 in fact embraced the whole population, and 
 which no political change has much affected, that 
 both sides in the struggle were steeped in Bible 
 phrases and illustrations, showing, amongst other 
 things, the extent to which the English version 
 was being read by the population. 
 
 On the other hand, the severity of triumph¬ 
 ant Puritanism, and the iron rule of the Lord 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 
 
 93 
 
 Protector, made his government unpopular 
 amongst a people who have always resented ' 
 harsh mechanical organization of any kind. The 
 latitudinarians, always the most numerous, be¬ 
 came the most powerful, and at last it was an 
 easy matter for a few ambitious self-seekers to 
 bring about tl^e restoration of the hereditary 
 monarchy in Britain. 
 
 This restoration of the Stuart was, however, 
 after all but a makeshift put up with because the 
 defection from the high-strung principle of the 
 earlier period of the revolution left nothing to 
 take the place of Cromwell’s absolutism. The 
 nation was mainly out of sympathy with the 
 Court, which was unnational and Catholic in ten¬ 
 dency, and quite openly debauched. The nation 
 itself, though it had got rid of the severity of 
 Puritanism, was still Puritan, and welcomed the 
 Sunday Act of Charles II., which gave the due 
 legal stamp to Puritanism of the duller and more 
 respectable kind. But though enthusiastic Pu¬ 
 ritanism was no longer dominant, it was not ex¬ 
 tinct. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress shines 
 out, though a religious romance, amidst the dul- 
 ness of the literature of the time. The Quakers, 
 who represented in their beginning the peaceable 
 and religious side of the Levellers, arose and 
 grew and flourished in spite of persecution; the 
 Cameronians in Scotland made an ineffectual 
 armed resistance to the dying out of enthusiasm; 
 while across the Atlantic the descendents of the 
 earlier Puritans carried on an almost theocratic 
 government, which, among other things, perse- 
 
94 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 cuted the Quakers most cruelly. Little by lit¬ 
 tle, however, all that was not quite commonplace 
 and perfunctory died out in English Protestant¬ 
 ism, and respectable indifferentism had carried 
 all before it by the end of the century. Politics 
 and religion had no longer any real bond of 
 union, and the religious side of Puritanism, 
 Evangelicanism, disappears here, to come to light 
 again in the next century under the leadership 
 of Whitfield. 
 
 English Puritanism had left behind it a re¬ 
 spectable, habitual, and formal residuum strong 
 enough to resent James II.’s Papistry, and to 
 make its resentment felt; while at the same time 
 the constitutionalism, which began the anti-ab¬ 
 solutist opposition in Charles I.’s time, and which 
 had been interrupted by Cromwell’s iron and 
 Charles II.’s mud absolutism, gathered head 
 again and soon assumed definite form. The 
 Stuart monarchy, with its “divine right” of ab¬ 
 solute sovereignty, was driven from England in 
 the person of James II., a constitutional king 
 was found in William of Orange, and constitu¬ 
 tional party government began. 
 
 Thus, in spite of interruption, was carried out 
 the middle-class revolution in England; like all' 
 other revolutions, it arrived at the point which 
 it really set out to gain; but not until it had 
 shaken off much which at one time helped for¬ 
 ward its progress, and which was and still is 
 mistaken for an essential part of it. Religious 
 and Republican enthusiasm, although they (es¬ 
 pecially the former) played their part in abolish- 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 
 
 95 
 
 ing the reactionary clogs on the progress of the 
 middle classes, had to disappear as elements 
 which would have marred the true historical end 
 of that revolution; to-wit, the creation of a pow¬ 
 erful middle class freed from all restrictions that 
 would interfere with it in its pursuit of indi¬ 
 vidual profit, derived from the exploitation of 
 industry. 
 
 Thenceforth, till our own times, respectable 
 political life in England has been wrapped up in 
 whiggery; tinged, on one side, with the last 
 faint remains of feudalism in the form of a quite 
 unreal sentiment, involving no practical conse¬ 
 quences but the acceptance of the name of Tory; 
 and on the other by as faint a sentiment towards 
 democracy, which was probably rather a tra¬ 
 ditional survival of the feeling of the old days of 
 the struggle between King and Parliament, than 
 any holding out of the hand towards the real 
 democracy that was silently forming underneath 
 the government of the respectables. 
 
 The first part of the eighteenth century, there¬ 
 fore, finds England solid and settled; all the old 
 elements of disturbance and aspiration hardened 
 into constitutional bureaucracy; religion recog¬ 
 nized as a State formality, but having no influ¬ 
 ence whatever on the corporate life of the coun¬ 
 try, its sole reality a mere personal sentiment, 
 not at all burdensome to the practical business of 
 life; the embers of the absolute re-action on the 
 point of extinction, and swept off easily and even 
 lazily when they make a show of being danger¬ 
 ous ; the nobility a mere titled upper order of the 
 
96 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 bourgeoisie; the country prosperous, gaining on 
 French and on Dutch in America and India, and 
 beginning to found its colonial and foreign 
 markets, and its navy fast becoming paramount 
 on all seas; the working classes better off than 
 at any time since the fifteenth century, but hope¬ 
 less, dull, neither adventurous nor intellectual ; 
 Art, if not actually dead, represented by a Court 
 painter or so of ugly ladies and stupid gentle¬ 
 men (Sir Joshua the king of said painters) ; a 
 literature produced by a few word-spinning es¬ 
 sayists and prosiac versifiers, like Addison and 
 Pope, priding themselves on a well-bred con¬ 
 tempt for whatever was manly or passionate or 
 elevating in the past of their own language; 
 while their devotion to the classical times, de¬ 
 rived from the genuine and powerful enthusiasm 
 of the Renaissance, had sunk to nothing but a 
 genteel habit of expression. 
 
 Here then in England we may begin to see 
 what the extinction of feudality was to end in, 
 for the time at least. Mediaeval England is gone, 
 the manners and ways of thought of the people 
 are utterly changed; they are called English, but 
 they are another people from that which dwelt 
 in England in the fifteenth century when “fore¬ 
 stalling and regrating” were misdemeanors; 
 when the guild ruled over the production of 
 goods, and division of labor was not yet; when 
 both in art and literature the people had their 
 share,—nay, when what of both there was, was 
 produced by the people themselves. Gone also 
 is militant Puritanism, buried deep under moun- 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 
 
 97 
 
 tains of cool formality. England is bouregeois 
 and successful throughout its whole life; without 
 aspirations, for its self-satisfaction is too com¬ 
 plete for any, yet gathering force for develop¬ 
 ment of a new kind,—as it were a nation taking 
 breath for a new spring. 
 
 For under its prosperous self-satisfaction lies 
 the birth of a great change—a revolution in in¬ 
 dustry—and England is at the time we are writ¬ 
 ing of simply preparing herself for that change. 
 Her prosperity and solid bureaucratic constitu¬ 
 tional government—nay, even the commonplace 
 conditions of life in the country, are enabling 
 her to turn all her attention towards this change, 
 and towards development of the natural resources 
 in which she is so rich. 
 
 The fall of the feudal system, the invasion of 
 the individualist method of producing goods, and 
 of simple exchange of commodities, were bound 
 to lead to the final development of the epoch— 
 the rise of the great machine industries—and 
 now the time for that development is at hand. 
 The growing world-market is demanding more 
 than the transitional methods of production can 
 supply. 
 
 In matters political prejudice is giving way to 
 necessity, and all obstacles are being rapidly 
 cleared away before the advent of a new epoch 
 for labor; an epoch of which we may say that if 
 no great change were at hand for it in its turn, 
 it would have been the greatest disaster that has 
 ever happened to the race of man. 
 

 / ' 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION-FRANCE 
 
 # "T"'HE civil war called the Fronde (1648- 
 1654) ushered in the period of the Grand 
 Monarque. Of this faction-fight it should be 
 noted that the bourgeoisie, led by the Councils 
 of lawyers called Parliaments, who were at first 
 on the side of the Minister Mazarin, and were 
 used by him, were driven to take part with the 
 “Princess” who opposed him, and who in their 
 turn used them and flung them away, after they 
 had drawn the chestnuts out of the fire for them; 
 the Fronde, however, has its interest as being 
 the germ of the disaffection of the middle classes 
 with the nobility and government. As we have 
 said, Louis XIV. succeeded in making the 
 French monarchy a pure autocratic bureaucracy, 
 completely centralized in the person of the sov¬ 
 ereign. This with an ambitious King like Louis 
 XIV. involved constant war, for he felt himself 
 bound to satisfy his ideal of the necessary ex¬ 
 pansion of the territory and influence of France, 
 which he looked upon as the absolute property 
 of the King. The general success of Louis XIV. 
 brought with it the success of these wars of ag- 
 
 98 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 
 
 99 
 
 grandisement, and France became very power¬ 
 ful during his reign. 
 
 Under the rule of his minister Colbert, indus¬ 
 trialism in France was, one may say, forced as 
 in a hothouse. Colbert developed the new modes 
 of production that were inevitably coming, and 
 thereby established the workshop, or division of 
 labor system, which is the transition from handi¬ 
 craft t o machine production. He spared no 
 pains or energy in bringing this about. Often, 
 with more or less success, he drove an industry 
 forward artificially, as with the silk and woolen 
 manufactures. For he was eager to win for 
 France a foremost place in the world-market, 
 which he thought but the due accompaniment of 
 her monarchical glory; and he knew that with¬ 
 out it that glory would have died of starvation, 
 since the taxes would not have yielded the neces¬ 
 sary food. It is true that even in England grow¬ 
 ing commercialism was subordinate to constitu¬ 
 tionalism, the English form of bureaucracy; but 
 the idea was already afoot there that the former 
 was rather an end than a means, whereas in 
 France commercialism was completely subordin¬ 
 ated to the glory of the autocratic monarchy— 
 a mere feeder of it. This overshadowing of com¬ 
 merce by the sovereign, and the irritation it 
 caused to the manufacturing bougeoisie, was un¬ 
 doubtedly one of the causes of the revolution. 
 
 The religion of this period of the “Grand Mon- 
 arque” shows little more than an ecclesiastical 
 struggle between Gallicanism on the one hand, 
 which claimed a feeble spark of independence as 
 
100 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 regards Rome for the French Church, and is 
 represented by Fenelon and Bossuet, and 
 Jesuitry on the other hand, which was the ex¬ 
 ponent of Roman centralization. The leading 
 intelligence of the time was on the Gallican side; 
 but the king in the long run favored the Jesuits, 
 as being the readier instruments of his bureau¬ 
 cratic rule. Outside this ecclesiastical quarrel 
 there was no life whatever in religion, except 
 what was shown by the existence of a few erratic 
 sects of mystics, like the Quietists and Jansenists. 
 The former of these may be said to have put for¬ 
 ward the complete abnegation of humanity in the 
 presence of God, while the latter attempted a 
 revivification of the pietism of the Catholic 
 Church, accompanied by a galvanism of the me¬ 
 diaeval faith in miracle-working. Finally the ad¬ 
 vent of the revolutionary writers, heralded by 
 Helvetius, Condillac, and others, and culminat¬ 
 ing in the influence of Voltaire, Rosseau, Di¬ 
 derot, and the Encyclopaedists, destroyed the last 
 vestiges of religious belief among the educated 
 classes of France. 
 
 Two struggles, we may mention, were going 
 on during the early reign of Louis XV.,—that 
 with the Jesuits, with their bull Unigenitus, 
 which declared the necessity of uniformity with 
 the Roman See, in which the Parliaments took 
 the Gallican side, while the Court generally took 
 that of the Jesuits: and the contest between King 
 and parliaments (law courts) for prestige and au¬ 
 thority. These parliaments were at first councils, 
 called by the King from his baronage to give ad- 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 
 
 101 
 
 vice as to the laws of the realm. The barons 
 gradually fell out of them, and the lawyers 
 (probably their legal assessors) took their place; 
 so that at the time we speak of they were wholly 
 composed of professional lawyers. They had 
 been largely used by the kings for consolidating 
 their power over the feudal nobles, since they 
 were in the habit of deciding all doubtful points 
 of customary law in favor of the King: but by 
 Louis XV.’s time they had in fact become the 
 champions of the quasi-constitutional rights of 
 the respectable citizens from the formally legal 
 point of view, and were invariably opposed on 
 the one hand to the Jesuits and on the other to 
 the Freethinkers. 
 
 The Regency which succeeded to the reign of 
 Louis XIV. saw the definite beginnings of the 
 last corruption which betokened the Revolution. 
 The wars of aggrandizement still went on but were 
 now generally unsuccessful; the industrialism set 
 agoing by Colbert progressed steadily; but the 
 profits to be gained by it did not satisfy the more 
 adventurous ^spirits of the period, and the Re¬ 
 gency saw a curious exposition of stock-jobbery 
 before its time in the form of the Mississippi 
 scheme of Law, which had its counterpart in 
 England in the South-Sea Bubble. It was a 
 financing operation—to get something out of 
 nothing—founded on the mercantile theory of 
 economv then current, which showed but an im- 
 perfect knowledge of the industrial revolution 
 beginning under men’s very eyes, and assumed 
 that the wealth of a country consists in the 
 
102 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 amount of the precious metals which it can re¬ 
 tain. This assumption, we may observe, is curi¬ 
 ously exemplified in the half-commercial, half- 
 buccaneering romances of Defoe. 
 
 The free-thinkers before-named were the es¬ 
 sence of the bourgeois party from its intellectual 
 side, as the parliaments were from the legal side. 
 These two elements formed all that there was of 
 opposition till the first mutterings of definite 
 revolution were heard, though of course the im¬ 
 portance of the thinkers was out of all propor¬ 
 tion to that of the lawyer-parliaments. The ac¬ 
 cession of the once Dauphin, now Louis XVI., to 
 the throne, was hailed by the philosophers, es¬ 
 pecially as his calling Turgot to reform the 
 finances was justly considered a sign of his sin¬ 
 cerity. But his attempts in this direction were 
 frustrated by the Court oligarchy; and as a re¬ 
 sult the discontent of the respectable bourgeois 
 opposition became a rallying-point for the ele¬ 
 ments of the actual revolution; for though it 
 meant nothing but intelligent conservatism, it 
 formed a screen behind which the true revolu¬ 
 tionary forces could gather for the attack on 
 privilege. 
 
 It is necessary to say something about the litera¬ 
 ture and art of France before the Revolution, 
 because that country is the especial exponent, 
 particularly in art, of the degradation which in¬ 
 dicated the rottenness of society. 
 
 As in England, literature was formal and 
 stilted, and produced little except worthlessly 
 clever essays and still more worthless verses that 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 
 
 103 
 
 have no claim to be called poetry. The French 
 verse-makers, however, aimed at something 
 higher than the English, and produced works 
 which depend on pomp and style for any claim 
 to attention they may have, and for the rest are 
 unreal and lifeless. Amidst them all one name 
 stands forward as representing some reality— 
 Moliere, to wit. But the life and genuineness of 
 his comedies serves to show the corruption of the 
 times as clearly as the dead classicalism of Ra¬ 
 cine; for he, the one man of genius of the time, 
 was driven into the expression of mere cynicism. 
 In one remarkable passage of his works he 
 shows a sympathy for the ballad-poetry of the 
 people, which, when noticed at all in England at 
 the same period, and even much later, received 
 a kind of indulgent patronage rather than ad¬ 
 miration. At the same time, as there was a sham 
 tragedy current at this period, so also there was 
 a sham love of simplicity. The ladies and gen¬ 
 tlemen of the period ignored the real peasants 
 who were the miserable slaves of the French 
 landlords, and invented in their dramas, poems, 
 and pictures sham shepherds and peasants, who 
 were bundles of conscious unreality, inane imi¬ 
 tations of the latter classics. This literature 
 and art would be indeed too contemptible for 
 mention, if it were not a sign of a society rotting 
 into revolution. 
 
 The fine arts, which had in the end of the six¬ 
 teenth century descended from the expression of 
 the people’s faith and aspirations into that of the 
 fancy, ingenuity, and whim of gifted individuals, 
 
104 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 fell lower still. They lost every atom of beauty 
 and dignity, and retained little even of the in¬ 
 genuity of the earlier Renaissance, becoming 
 mere expensive and pretentious though carefully- 
 finished upholstery, mere adjuncts of pomp and 
 state, the expression of the insolence of riches 
 and the complacency of respectability. Once 
 again it must be said of the art, as of the general 
 literature of the period, that no reasonable man 
 could even bestow a passing glance at it but for 
 the incurable corruption of society that it be¬ 
 tokens. 
 
 Here, then, we have in France a contrast to 
 the state of things in England. No constitution¬ 
 alism was here; nothing but an absolution de¬ 
 spised even by the privileged class; a govern¬ 
 ment unable to move in the direction of progress, 
 even when, as in the case of Louis XVI., its 
 head had a tendency to the intelligent conser¬ 
 vatism above mentioned ; bankrupt also amidst 
 a people broken down, and a commerce ham¬ 
 pered by the exactions of the hereditary privi¬ 
 lege which was its sole support; discredited by 
 unsuccessful wars, so that the door was shut to 
 its ambition on that road; at home it had to face 
 uneasily the new abstract ideas of liberty and 
 the rights of man. These ideas were professed, 
 indeed, by those who had an interest in preserv¬ 
 ing the existing state of things, but were lis¬ 
 tened to and pondered over by people who found 
 that state of things unbearable. 
 
 The contrast between the condition of Eng¬ 
 land and France, produced in either case by the 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION 
 
 105 
 
 unconscious development toward essential 
 change, is remarkable. In England the material 
 condition of the country was good, under the 
 regime of successful whiggery; the middle 
 classes were prosperous and contented; the work¬ 
 ing classes were keeping their heads above water 
 in tolerable comfort, and nothing was further 
 from their thoughts than that revolutionary 
 change, to which nevertheless they were drifting 
 swiftly but quietly. 
 
 On the other hand, France was impoverished 
 by the long wars of the Grand Monarch; the 
 lower classes were sunk in misery obvious to 
 the most superficial observer. The commercial 
 middle classes were discontented and uneasy un¬ 
 der the pressure of the remains of feudalism, 
 which seemed to them to be still flourishing, 
 though it was but the lifeless trunk of the old 
 tree, already sapped by Louis XIV. To crown 
 all there was a spirit of intellectual disaffection 
 in the air. The theories of liberty and ration¬ 
 alism, though originally derived from English 
 thinkers, were developed and put into literary 
 form by the coterie of French writers (already 
 mentioned) who took the name of Les Philos- 
 ophes, and in this form they produced far more 
 effects than they did in the country of their birth, 
 supplying the formulae of the actual Revolution. 
 The names of Voltaire and Rosseau, even apart 
 from the Encyclopaedists, show how eagerly the 
 whole aspect of affairs was far more dramatic in 
 new theories were being received. In short, the 
 whole aspect of affairs was far more dramatic in 
 
106 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 France than in England; as was likely to be the 
 case, since in France the Revolution was doomed 
 to be primarily political, and in England mainly 
 industrial. 
 
 » 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: CONSTITUTIONAL 
 
 STAGE 
 
 npHE bankruptcy towards which France was 
 staggering under the regime of an un¬ 
 taxed privileged noblesse drove the Court into 
 the dangerous step of attempting to do some¬ 
 thing, and after desperate efforts to carry on the 
 old corruption by means of financing operations 
 under Calonne and others, aided by an assembly 
 of the “Notables,” which was a kind of irregular 
 taxing council, the Court was at last compelled 
 to summon the States-General to meet on the 4th 
 May 1789. This was a body which was pretty 
 much analogous to a Parliament of our mediaeval 
 kings, that is little more than a machine for levy¬ 
 ing taxes, but which attempted to sell its fiscal 
 powers to the King for redress of certain 
 grievances. This States-General had not met 
 since 1641. Bickering between the three houses, 
 —Clergy, Noblesse, and Commons,—immedi¬ 
 ately began, but the latter, which was middle- 
 class in spirit though including some of the lower 
 nobility, gave tokens of its coming predominance 
 ifrom the first. On the 20th of June the Court 
 
 107 
 
108 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 attempted a coup d'etat, and the Third Estate 
 held its celebrated session in the Tennis Court, 
 and so broke with the old feudal idea, and be¬ 
 came the constituent -‘National Assembly,” the 
 Court making a feeble resistance at the time. 
 
 Concurrently with this legal and constitutional 
 movement came what M. Taine well calls “the 
 spontaneous anarchy” of the peasants in the 
 Provinces, with which the attack of Reveillon’s 
 Factory in Paris was in sympathy. The King, 
 Queen and Court expected to put down these 
 disturbances easily, but the occurrences on the 
 night of the Necker demonstration, in which the 
 French guards (who had not hesitated to fire 
 on the Reveillon rioters) assisted the people 
 against the cavalry, called the Royal German regi¬ 
 ment, became an event which really made an end 
 of the hopes of the Court of crushing the move¬ 
 ment by military force. 
 
 The next act of the popular revolution was the 
 taking of the Bastille: this ancient castle was ob¬ 
 noxious to the revolutionists for being from its 
 earliest foundation a royal fortress for the re¬ 
 pression of the vassals, and in its later times had 
 become a symbol of royal privilege, and the 
 prison where the infamous lettres de cachet were 
 executed. 
 
 The slaying of Berthier and Foulon, the types 
 of fiscal extortioners, that followed this event 
 should be noted here as the first example of that 
 wild popular justice, in which the element of re¬ 
 venge played so great a part. 
 
 The Court gave way at once; the King visited 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 109 
 
 Paris as a sign of submission, and certain of the 
 higher nobility fled from the coming ruin. 
 
 The ground thus cleared for it, the Constitu¬ 
 tional Revolution went on apace; feudal titles 
 were abolished, the Church reduced to a salaried 
 official department; the very geography of the 
 country was changed, the old provinces with 
 their historic names abolished, and France di¬ 
 vided into eighty-three departments called after 
 the rivers and other natural features; everything 
 , was to be reduced to a pattern, constitutional, 
 centralized, bourgeois, bureaucracy. 
 
 But the other element of revolution was also 
 stirring. The alliance of the mere starvelings 
 could not be done without by the bourgeoisie, 
 and they had it whether they would or no. A 
 Jacquerie had arisen in the country, and armed 
 peasants everywhere burned the chateaux or 
 country-houses of the gentlemen, and hunted 
 away the occupants. The Revolution was neces¬ 
 sarily accompanied by the dislocation of all in¬ 
 dustry, aggravated by bad harvests, and the 
 scarcity was bitterly felt everywhere. 
 
 In the midst of this the Court, recovering from 
 the first blow of the taking of the Bastille, began 
 to plot counter-revolution, and devised a scheme 
 for getting the King away from Versailles to 
 Rouen or elsewhere, and putting him at the 
 head of a reactionary army and an opposition re¬ 
 actionary Assembly. A banquet given by the 
 Court to a regiment supposed to be loyal, prac¬ 
 tically exposed this plot, and amidst all the terror 
 and irritation which it gave rise to, a popular ris- 
 
110 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 ing, headed by the famous march of the women 
 on Versailles, came to the aid of the Assembly, 
 and forced the King to go to Paris and take 
 up his abode at the Tuileries. In this affair the 
 mere Sansculotte element became very obvious. 
 It was stirred up by the artificial famine caused 
 by the financial and stock-jobbing operations of 
 the Court, and of private persons, the popular 
 middle-class minister, Necker, having been the 
 immediate cause of it by his issue of small paper 
 money. It was opposed by the bourgeois sol¬ 
 diery, the National Guard, headed by Lafayette, 
 who was the embodiment of the Constitutional 
 Revolution. This was followed by a further 
 flight of the noblesse and higher bourgeoisie 
 from France, which flight, as it were, gave a 
 token of the complete victory of Constitutional¬ 
 ism over the Court party. 
 
 For some time the King, or rather the Queen 
 and Court, carried on a struggle against the vic¬ 
 torious middle classes, apparently unconscious 
 of its extreme hopelessness; while the bourgeois 
 government for its part was quite prepared to 
 put down any popular movement, all the more 
 as it now had a formidable army in the shape 
 of the National Guard. But by this time there 
 had arisen a kind of People’s Parliament outside 
 the Assembly, the famous Jacobins Club and the 
 Cordelier Club to wit, and the sky was dark¬ 
 ening over for triumphant' Constitutionalism. 
 
 That triumph was celebrated by the great feast 
 of the Champ de Mars, 13th July, 1790, when 
 the King in the presence of delegates from all 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 111 
 
 France swore to the Constitution. But Royalist 
 plots went on all the same, and settled down 
 at last into a fixed conclusion of the flight of 
 the King to the northeastern frontier, where were 
 the remains of what regular army could be de¬ 
 pended on, with the threatening Austrian troops 
 at their back. As a trial the King attempted 
 at Easter to get as far as St. Cloud, announcing 
 his determination as a matter of course; but 
 he was stopped by a mixed crowd not wholly 
 Sansculotte, though Lafayette did his best to 
 help royalty, turned quasi-constitutional, in the 
 pinch. At last, on the 20th of June, the King 
 and the royal family made the great attempt, in 
 which they would most probably have succeeded 
 if they had not hampered themselves with all 
 kinds of absurd appliances of wealth and luxury, 
 and if they had had any idea of the kind of 
 stake they were playing for. As it was in spite 
 of, or perhaps partly because of, their having 
 arranged for various detachments of troops to 
 meet them on the way as escorts, they were 
 stopped at the little town of Varennes and 
 brought back again to Paris. It was a token 
 of the progress of ideas, that by this time the 
 King’s presence in Paris was looked at from a 
 twofold point of view. By the pure constitution¬ 
 alists as the necessary coping-stone to the Con¬ 
 stitution, without which it could not stand; but 
 by the revolutionists as a hostage held by the 
 French people in the face of hostile reactionary 
 Europe. Also now the word Republic was first 
 put forward, and at last it became clear that 
 
112 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 there were two parties amongst those who were 
 making the Constitution—the constitutional Roy¬ 
 alists and the Republicans. 
 
 The latter were supported by the people, who 
 flooded the Assembly with petitions for the de¬ 
 position of the King; the Assembly decided 
 against it on the ground of legal fiction familiar 
 to the anti-Royalist party in our Parliamentry 
 wars, that the King had been carried off by evil 
 and traitorous councillors. But the split between 
 the parties was emphasized by bloodshed. A 
 Jacobin petition lay for signature on the altar 
 of the Country in the Champ de Mars, and 
 great crowds were about it signing and looking 
 on. In the evening Lafayette marched on the 
 Champ de Mars with a body of National Guards, 
 proclaimed martial law by the hoisting of the 
 red flag, according to the recently made enact¬ 
 ment, and finally fired on the people, killing 
 many of them. 
 
 But in spite of this “massacre of the Champ 
 de Mars,” the Constitutionalists triumphed for 
 a time. The National Assembly completed its 
 work, and produced a constitution wholly bour¬ 
 geois and monarchial, which was accepted by 
 the King amidst one of those curious outbursts 
 of sentiment of which the epoch was so fruitful, 
 and which generally, as on this occasion, included 
 the exhibition of the little Dauphin in the arms 
 of his mother to the crowd. The National As¬ 
 sembly dissolved itself after enacting that none 
 of its members could be elected to the new 
 legislative body or first Parliament of the Revo- 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 113 
 
 lution. Of this Parliament the bourgeois Repub¬ 
 licans, the aristocracy of talent, became appar¬ 
 ently far the most powerful party: whatever 
 there was of talent that had frankly accepted 
 the alliance of the Sansculottes was outside the 
 Legislature. But another element was now added 
 to the contest, that of foreign war, Austria be¬ 
 ginning the attack. The obvious and necessary 
 Sympathy of the King and Court, with what had 
 now become their only chance of salvation, was 
 met by the equally necesary terror and indignation 
 of the revolutionists of all shades, which of course 
 strengthened the extreme party, who had every¬ 
 thing to lose from the success of a foreign inva¬ 
 sion. In spite of this the King, driven into a 
 corner, was in constant contention with the Leg¬ 
 islature, and used his constitutional right of veto 
 freely, yet was driven to accept a revolutionary 
 Ministry with Roland at its head; but as the 
 hope of deliverance from the invasion grew on 
 him he dismissed it again, and the Court found 
 itself ticketed with the name of the Austrian 
 Committee . On the 20th of June a popular dem¬ 
 onstration invaded the Tuileries, which was or¬ 
 ganized by the Girondists (at that time the domi¬ 
 nant revolutionary party whom Louis was at¬ 
 tacking directly), an event that marked the fail¬ 
 ure of the King’s attempt to reign constitution¬ 
 ally by means of party government. 
 
 As a constitutional counter-stroke Lafayette, 
 quite misunderstanding his strength, left the 
 army, and tried to stir up the Constitutionalists 
 to attack the Jacobins, but failed ignominously, 
 
114 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 and presently fled the country. The King once 
 more swearing to the Constitution at the Feast of 
 the Federates, wore armor underneath his clothes, 
 and insurrection was obviously brewing. The 
 Court fortified the Tuileries and gathered about 
 them whatever Royalist force was available, in¬ 
 cluding the Swiss Guard; and a desperate re¬ 
 sistance was prepared for with the faint hope 
 of the King being able to cut himself out and 
 reach the frontier; but the 10th of August ended 
 the matter. Those Constitutionalists who had 
 any intention of supporting the Court found 
 their hearts failing them, and even the “consti¬ 
 tutional” battalions of the National Guard were 
 prepared to take the popular side. The King 
 and royal family left the Tuileries for the Leg¬ 
 islature, leaving no orders for the unlucky Swiss, 
 who with mechanical military courage stood their 
 ground. The insurrectionary sections attacked 
 the Tuileries and carried it, though not without 
 heavy loss—1,200 killed, the Swiss being all slain 
 except a few who were carried off to prison. On 
 the 13th of August, the King and his family 
 were bestowed as prisoners in the Temple, and 
 the first act of the Revolution had come to an 
 end. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION I THE PROLETARIAN 
 
 STAGE 
 
 r PHE insurrection of the 10th of August which 
 culminated in the final downfall of the mon¬ 
 archy and the imprisonment of the King and 
 royal family in the Temple, was headed and 
 organized by a new body definitely revolutionary, 
 intended to be the expression of the power of 
 the proletariat, to-wit, the Commune of Paris, 
 the moving spirit of which was Marat, who 
 even had a seat of honor assigned to him in its 
 hall. Already, before the King had been sent 
 to the Temple, the Girdonin Vergniaud, as presi¬ 
 dent, had moved the suspension of the “hered¬ 
 itary representative” and the summoning of a 
 national Convention. Danton was made minister 
 of justice; and a new Court of Criminal Justice 
 was established for the trial of political offenses.. 
 The members of the Convention were chosen by 
 double election, but the property qualification 
 of “active and passive citizens” was done away 
 with. 
 
 While all this was going on the movement of 
 the reactionary armies on France was still afoot; 
 
 115 
 
116 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 and the furious flame of French national en¬ 
 thusiasm, which was afterwards used by the self- 
 seeking conqueror Napoleon, was lighted by the 
 necessity of the moment—not to be extinguished 
 in days long after his. We mention this here 
 because, in order to appreciate what follows, it 
 must be remembered that an armed coalition of 
 the absolutist countries was gathering together, 
 threatening to drown the Revolution in the blood 
 of the French people, and especially of the peo¬ 
 ple of Paris; that one of its armies, commanded 
 by the Duke of Brunswick, a famous general 
 of Frederick the Great, was already within a 
 few days’ march of the city; that nothing was 
 between Paris and destruction but undisciplined 
 levies and the rags of the neglected army formed 
 under the old regime; while at the same time 
 the famous royalist insurrection had broken out 
 in La Vendee. Every republican in Paris, there¬ 
 fore, had good reason to feel that both his own 
 life and the future of his country were in im¬ 
 mediate danger at the hands of those who did not 
 care what became of France and her people so 
 long as the monarchy could be restored. 
 
 Danton now demanded a search for arms, 
 which was carried out on the 29th of August; 
 and the prisons were filled with prisoners sus¬ 
 pected of royalist plotting, and many of them 
 surely guilty of it. 
 
 Verdun fell on the 2nd of September, and the 
 Duke of Brunswick boasted that he would pres¬ 
 ently dine in Paris; and on the same night the 
 irregular trials and slaughter of the prisoners 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 117 
 
 in Paris, known as the September Massacres, took 
 place. 
 
 The next day a circular was issued by the 
 Committee of Public Safety, approving of the 
 massacre, signed by Sergent, Panis (Danton’s 
 friend), and Marat, with seven others. 
 
 The Girondins in the Assembly and elsewhere 
 kept quiet for the time, though they afterwards 
 used the event against the Jacobins. 
 
 Meanwhile the French army, under Dumouriez, 
 had seized the woodland hills of the Argonne, 
 checked Brunswick, defeated him at Valmy, and 
 Paris was saved. 
 
 The Convention now met—on the 20th of 
 September—and the parties of the Girondins and 
 the Mountain, or extreme revolutionists, were at 
 once formed in it. It is noteworthy that while 
 it declared as its foundation the sovereignty 
 of the people and the abolition of royalty, it 
 also decreed that landed and other property was ' 
 sacred forever. Apropos of which, it may here 
 be mentioned that the bookseller Momoro, having 
 hinted at something like agrarian law, and some 
 faint shadow of Socialism, had to go into hiding 
 to avoid hanging. 
 
 So far, therefore, we have got no further 
 than the complete triumph of bourgeois repub¬ 
 licanism. The possibility, notwithstanding, of its 
 retaining its position depended, as the event 
 showed, on the support of the proletariat, which 
 was only given on the terms that the material 
 condition of the workers should be altered for the 
 better by the new regime. And those terms, in 
 
118 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 the long-run, bourgeois republicanism could not 
 keep, and therefore it fell. 
 
 The Girondins or moderate party in the Con¬ 
 vention began their assault on the Jacobins on the 
 subject of the September Massacres, and also by 
 attacking Marat personally, which attack, how¬ 
 ever, failed egregiously. The Girondins, as their 
 name implies, leaned on the support of the prov¬ 
 inces, where respectability was stronger than in 
 Paris, and tried to levy a bodyguard for the de¬ 
 fense of the Convention against the Paris popu¬ 
 lace ; but though they got the decree for it passed, 
 they could not carry it out. In their character 
 of political economists, also, they resisted the im¬ 
 posing of a maximum price on grain, a measure 
 which the scarcity caused by the general disturb¬ 
 ance made imperative, if the proletariat were to 
 have any share in the advantages of the Revolu¬ 
 tion. In short, the Girondins were obviously 
 out of sympathy with the mass of the people. 
 
 The trial of the King now came on, and 
 tested the Girondins in a fresh way; they mostly 
 voted his death, but as if driven to do so from 
 a feeling that opinion was against them, and 
 that they might as well have some credit for it, 
 Louis was beheaded on the 21st of January, 1793, 
 and as an immediate consequence England and 
 Spain declared war. But this business of the 
 King made a kind of truce between the parties, 
 which, however, soon came to an end. Marat 
 was the great object of attack, and on the 25th 
 of February, 1793, he was decreed accused on ac¬ 
 count of some passages in his journal approving 
 
I 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 119 
 
 of the bread riots which had taken place, and 
 suggesting the hanging of a forestaller or two. 
 On the other hand, on the 10th of March the 
 section Bonconseil demanded the arrest of the 
 prominent Girondins. Meantime, Danton had 
 been trying all along to keep the peace between 
 the two parties, but on the 1st of April the 
 Girondins accused him of complicity with Dumou- 
 riez, who had now fled over the frontier, and 
 so forced him into becoming one of their most 
 energetic enemies. The position of the Giron¬ 
 dins was now desperate. On the 24th of March 
 Marat was acquitted and brought back in triumph 
 to the Convention. 
 
 The Girondins got a packed committee of 
 twelve appointed in the interest of the Conven¬ 
 tion as against the Paris sections. As an answer 
 to this a central committee of the sections was 
 formed, which on the 31st of March dominated 
 the Municipality (not loth to be so dealt with) 
 and surrounded the Convention with troops. After 
 an attempt on the part of the Girondins to assert 
 their freedom of action, the Convention decreed 
 them accused, and they were put under arrest. 
 They died afterwards, some by the guillotine, 
 some even more miserably, within a few months; 
 but their party is at an end from this date. All 
 that happened in the Convention from this time 
 to the fall of Robespierre in “Thermidori’ was 
 the work of a few revolutionists, each trying to 
 keep level with the proletarian instinct, and each 
 falling in turn. They had not the key to the 
 great secret; they were still bourgeois, and still 
 
120 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 supposed that there must necessarily be a proper¬ 
 ties proletariat led by bourgeois, or at least 
 served by them; they had not conceived the idea 
 of the extinction of classes, and the organiza¬ 
 tion of the people itself for its own ends. 
 
 Marat’s death at the hand of Charlotte Corday, 
 on July 14th, removed the only real rival to 
 Robespierre, and the only man who could have 
 modified the extravagance of the Terror. 
 
 The law of maximum was now passed, how¬ 
 ever, and a cumulative income tax, so that, as 
 Carlyle remarks, the workman was at least bet¬ 
 ter off under the Terror than he had ever been 
 before. 
 
 Robespierre, Danton and the Hebertists were 
 now what of force was left in the Convention, 
 and the first of these was not slow to make up 
 his mind to get the reins of power into his own 
 hands. Meantime, an attempt was made to in¬ 
 stitute a new worship founded on Materialism; 
 but, like all such artificial attempts to establish 
 what is naturally the long growth of time, it 
 failed. Chaumette, Hebert, and their followers 
 were the leaders in this business, which Robes¬ 
 pierre disapproved of, and Danton growled at. 
 
 The Extraordinary Tribunal under Fouquier 
 Tinville, the agent of the Terror, speedily got 
 rid of all obstacles to the Revolution, and of 
 many of the foremost rank of its supporters. 
 Robespierre became at last practical dictator, 
 partly owing to his adroit steering between the 
 parties, and his industry and careful painstaking, 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 121 
 
 and partly to his reputation for incorruptibility 
 and republican asceticism. 
 
 The Hebertists, who were so called from He¬ 
 bert, their leader, and who represented the prole¬ 
 tarian instinct or germ of Socialism, under the 
 | name of the ‘‘Enrages’’ (rabids), were accused at 
 Robespierre’s instance, found guilty and executed. 
 Danton, giving way it would seem to some im¬ 
 pulse towards laziness inherent in his nature, let 
 himself be crushed, and died along with Camille 
 Desmoulins on March 31st, 1794, and at last 
 Robespierre was both in reality and appearance 
 supreme. On the 8th of June he inaugurated his 
 new worship by his feast of the Supreme Being, 
 and two days later got a law passed (the law 
 Prairial) which enabled him to condemn any one 
 to the guillotine at pleasure; and at this ominous 
 grumblings began to be heard. According to 
 a story current, Cornot got by accident at a 
 list of forty to be arrested, among whom he 
 read his own name. On the 26th of July Robes¬ 
 pierre was met by unexpected opposition in the 
 Convention. The next day he was decreed ac¬ 
 cused at the Convention, and Henriot deposed 
 from the Commandership of the National Guard; 
 but there was a respite which a more ready man, 
 a man of military instinct at least, might have 
 used. Robespierre lacked that instinct; Henriot 
 failed miserably in his attempt to crush the Con¬ 
 vention. The armed sections of Paris, on being 
 appealed to by the Convention, wavered and gave 
 way, and Robespierre was arrested. In fact,Robes¬ 
 pierre seems to have worn out the patience of the 
 
122 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 people by his continued executions. Had he 
 proclaimed an amnesty after his Feast of the 
 Supreme Being, he would probably have had 
 a longer lease of power; as it was he and his 
 tail died on the 28th of July. 
 
 There was nothing left to carry on the Revo¬ 
 lution after this but a knot of self-seeking poli¬ 
 ticians of the usual type; they had only to keep 
 matters going until they were ready for the dic¬ 
 tator who could organize for his own purposes 
 people and army, and who came in the shape of 
 Napoleon. The proletarians were no longer need¬ 
 ed as allies, and disunited, ignorant of principles, 
 and used to trust to leaders, they could make no 
 head against the Society, which they had shaken 
 indeed, owing to its internal dissensions, but 
 which they were not yet able to destroy. 
 
 One event only there remains to be mentioned, 
 the attempt of Baboeuf and his followers to 
 get a proletarian republic recognized; it has been 
 called an insurrection, but it never came to that, 
 being crushed while it was yet only the begin¬ 
 ning of a propaganda. Baboeuf and his follow¬ 
 ers were brought to trial in April, 1796. He and 
 Darthes were condemned to death, but killed 
 themselves before the sentence could be carried 
 out. Ten others were condemned to prison and 
 exile; and so ended the first Socialist propa¬ 
 ganda. 
 
 It is commonly said that Napoleon crushed 
 the Revolution, but what he really did was to put 
 on it the final seal of law and order. The Revo¬ 
 lution was set on foot by the middle classes in 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 123 
 
 their own interests; the sentence that Napoleon 
 accepted as the expression of his aims, “la car- 
 riere ouverte aux talens”—“the career thrown 
 open to talent”—is the motto of middle-class 
 supremacy. It implies the overthrow of aristo¬ 
 cratic privilege and the setting up in its place of 
 a money aristocracy, founded on the privilege 
 of exploitation, amidst a world of so-called “free 
 competition.” The middle-class, the first begin¬ 
 nings of which we saw formed in mediaeval times, 
 after a long and violent struggle, has conquered 
 and is supreme from henceforth. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 TN the last- chapter, wherein the condition of 
 England was dealt with, we left it a prosper¬ 
 ous country, in the ordinary sense of the word, 
 under the rule of an orderly constitutionalism. 
 There was no need here for the violent destruc¬ 
 tion of aristocratic privilege; it was of itself 
 melting into money-privilege; and all was getting 
 ready for the completest and securest system of 
 the plunder of labor which the world has yet seen. 
 
 England was comparatively free in the bour¬ 
 geois sense; there were far fewer checks than in 
 France to interfere with the exaction of the 
 tribute which labor has to pay to property to be 
 allowed to live. In a word, on the one hand, 
 exploitation was veiled; and on the other, the 
 owners of property had no longer any duties to 
 perform in return for the above-said tribute. 
 Nevertheless, all this had to«go on a small scale 
 for a while. 
 
 Population had not increased largely since the 
 beginning of the seventeenth century; ag¬ 
 riculture was flourishing; one-thirtieth of the 
 grain raised was exported from England; 
 
 124 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 125 
 
 the working classes were not hard pressed, 
 and could not yet be bought and sold in masses. 
 There were no large manufacturing towns, and 
 no need for them; the presence of the material 
 to be worked up, rather than the means for 
 working it mechanically—fuel, to-wit—gave a 
 manufacturing character to this or that country¬ 
 side. It was, for example, the sheep-pastures of 
 the Yorkshire hillsides, and not the existence of 
 coal beneath them, which made the neighborhood 
 of the northern Bradford a weaving country. Its 
 namesake on the Wiltshire Avon was in those 
 days at least as important a center of the cloth¬ 
 ing industry. The broadcloth of the Gloucester¬ 
 shire valleys, Devonshire and Hampshire kersies, 
 Witney blankets and Chipping Norton tweeds, 
 meant sweet grass and long wool, with a little 
 water-power, and not coal, to turn the fulling- 
 mills, to which material to be worked up was 
 to be brought from the four quarters of the 
 globe. 
 
 The apparent condition of labor in those days 
 seems almost idyllic, compared with what it now 
 is; but it must be remembered that then as now 
 the worker was in the hands of the monoplist 
 of land and raw material; nor was it likely that 
 the latter should have held his special privilege 
 for two hundred years without applying some 
 system whereby to develop and increase it. 
 
 Between the period of the decay of the craft- 
 guilds and this latter half of the eighteenth 
 century there had grown up a system of labor 
 which could not have been applied to the medi- 
 
126 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 seval workmen; for they worked for themselves 
 and not for a master or exploiter, and thus were 
 masters of their material, their tools and the time. 
 This system is that of the Division of Labor; 
 under it the unit of labor is not an individual 
 man, but a group, every member of which is help¬ 
 less by himself, but trained by constant practice 
 to the repetition of a small part of the work, 
 acquires great precision and speed in its per¬ 
 formance. In short, each man is not so much 
 a machine as a part of a machine. For exam¬ 
 ple, it takes five men to make a glass bottle; 
 it is the group of these five men that makes 
 the bottle, not any one of them. It is clear that 
 under this system the individual workman is 
 entirely at the mercy of his master the caplitaist 
 in his capacity of superintender of labor: in 
 order not be crushed by him, he must combine to 
 oppose his own interests to those of his em¬ 
 ployer. 
 
 It was by this method then, that the demands 
 of the growing world-market were supplied down 
 to the end of the eighteenth century. The great 
 political economist, Adam Smith, whose book 
 was first published in 1771, marks the beginning 
 of the transition between this system and that of 
 the great machine industries; but his work im¬ 
 plies throughout the Division of Labor system. 
 
 That system was now to melt into the new 
 one: the workman, from being a machine, was 
 to become the auxiliary of a machine. The in¬ 
 vention of the spinning-jenny by Hargreaves 
 in 1760 is the first event of the beginning of this 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 Industrial Revolution. From thence to the utili¬ 
 zation of steam as a motive-force, and thence 
 again to our own days, the stream of invention 
 has been continuous. The discovery that iron 
 could be made with pit-coal removed the seat 
 of the iron manufacture from the wooded coun¬ 
 tries of the south and west, where the old iron¬ 
 works, called “bloomeries,” used to be carried 
 on, and in which wood was the fuel used, to the 
 northern and midland coal districts, and all man¬ 
 ufacture of any importance flowed to the seat 
 of fuel; so that South Lancashire, for instance, 
 was changed from a country of moorland and 
 pasture, with a few market towns and the an¬ 
 cient manufacturing city of Manchester, into a 
 district where the “villages, 1 ” still so called, but 
 with populations of from fifteen or twenty 
 
 to thirty thousand souls, are pretty much 
 contiguous, and the country has all but 
 disappeared. Of course a great part of 
 this is the work of the years that have 
 
 followed on the invention of railways; but 
 
 even in the earlier period of this industrial 
 
 revolution the change was tremendous and sud¬ 
 den, and the sufferings of the working classes 
 very great, as no attempt was made to alleviate 
 the distress that was inevitably caused by the 
 change from the use of human hands to ma¬ 
 chinery. Nor indeed could it have been made in 
 a country governed by bourgeois constitutional¬ 
 ism until measures were actually forced on the 
 Government. 
 
 In 1811 the prevailing distress was betokened 
 
128 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 by the first outbreak of the Luddites. These were 
 organized bands of men who went about break¬ 
 ing up the machinery which was the immediate 
 cause of their want of employment and conse¬ 
 quent starvation. The locality where these riots 
 were most frequent was the northern midland 
 counties, where the new-invented stocking-frames 
 were specially obnoxious to them. The Luddites 
 became the type of bodies of rioters who by a 
 half-blind instinct throughout this period threw 
 themselves against the advancing battalions of 
 industrial revolution. 
 
 In 1816, the year which followed the peace 
 with France, the cessation of all the war indus¬ 
 tries threw still more people out of employment, 
 and in addition the harvest was a specially bad 
 one. As a consequence, this hunger insurrection 
 was particularly vigorous in that year. The riots 
 were put down with corresponding violence, and 
 the rioters punished with the utmost harshness. 
 But as times mended somewhat, this insurrection, 
 which was, as we have said, a mere matter 
 of hunger, and was founded on no principle, died 
 out, although for a time riots having for their 
 object destruction of property, especially of the 
 plant and stock of manufacturers, went on 
 through the whole of the first half of the 
 century. The “Plug Riots/’ 1 in the middle of the 
 Chartist agitation, may be taken for an example 
 of these. 
 
 1 This meant destruction of boilers in factories, the 
 rioters pulling out the plugs to ensure their bursting. 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 129 
 
 It was a necessary consequence of the introduc¬ 
 tion of elaborate machinery that women and chil¬ 
 dren should be largely employed in factories 
 to diminish the number of adult males. This 
 resource for the development of'the profits of the 
 new system was used by the manufacturers with 
 the utmost recklessness, till at last it became clear 
 to the bourgeois government that the scandal 
 created by its abuse would put an end to its use 
 altogether, unless something were done to pal¬ 
 liate its immediate evils. Accordingly a series 
 of Factory Acts were passed, in the teeth of the 
 most strenuous and unscruplous resistance on the 
 part of the capitalists, who grudged the imme* 
 diate loss which resulted in the hampering of the 
 “roaring trade” they were driving, even though 
 it were for the ultimate benefit of their class. The 
 first of these Acts which was really intended to 
 work was passed in 1830, and they were consoli¬ 
 dated finally in 1867. It should be understood 
 that they were not intended to benefit the great 
 mass of adult workers, but were rather conces¬ 
 sions to the outcry of the philanthropists at 
 the condition of the women and children so em¬ 
 ployed. 
 
 It must be remembered also that the political 
 conflict between the landed gentry and the manu¬ 
 facturers forced on this reform. 
 
 Meanwhile, in spite of all the suffering caused 
 by the Industrial Revolution, it was impossible 
 for the capitalists to engross the whole of the 
 profits gained by it, or at least to go on piling 
 them up in an ever-increasing ratio. The class 
 
130 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 struggle took another form, besides that of mere 
 hunger riots and forcible repression, the Trades 
 Union to-wit. Although the primary intention 
 of these was the foundation of benefit societies, 
 which had been one of the practical uses to 
 which the guilds of the early Middle Ages had 
 been put, like them also they had at last to take 
 in hand matters dealing with the regulation of 
 labor. 
 
 The first struggles of the trades unions with 
 capital took place while they were still illegal; 
 but the repeal of the law against the combination 
 of workmen in 1824 set them partially free in 
 that respect, and they soon began to be a power 
 in the country. Aided by the rising tide of com¬ 
 mercial prosperity, which made the capitalists 
 more willing to yield up some part of their 
 enormous profits rather than carry on the strug¬ 
 gle a I’outrance, they prevailed in many trade 
 contests, and succeeded in raising the standard 
 of livelihood for skilled workmen, though of 
 course in ridiculous disproportion to the huge 
 increase in the sum of the national income. Fur¬ 
 ther than this it was and is impossible for them 
 to go, so long as they recognize the capitalists as 
 a necessary part of the organization of labor. 
 It was not at first understood by the capitalist 
 class that they did so recognize them, and conse¬ 
 quently in the period of their early successes the 
 trades unions were considered rather as danger¬ 
 ous revolutionists than as a part of the capitalist 
 system, which was their real position, and were 
 treated to that kind of virulent and cowardly 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 131 
 
 abuse and insult which the shopkeeper in terror 
 for his shop always has at his tongue’s end. 
 
 The abolition of the corn-laws in 1846 and 
 the consequent cheapening of necessary food 
 for the workers, the discovery of gold in Cali¬ 
 fornia and Australia, the prodigious increase in 
 the luxury and expenditure of the upper and 
 middle classes, all the action and reaction of the 
 commercial impulse created by the great machine 
 industries, gave an appearance of general pros¬ 
 perity to the country, in which, as we have said, 
 the skilled workmen did partake to a certain 
 extent; and the views of middle-class optimists 
 as to the continuance of bourgeois progress, and 
 the gradual absorption of all the “thrifty and 
 industrious” part of the working classes into its 
 ranks seemed confirmed until within the last few 
 years; all the more as the practical triumph of 
 the Liberal party had ceased to make “politics” 
 a burning question. Nevertheless, as a sign that 
 the underground lava had not ceased flowing, it 
 was noticed that ever since the ripening of the 
 great industries, in periods of about ten years 
 came recurring depressions of trade. These were 
 accounted for in various ingenious ways, but 
 otherwise did not trouble the capitalist mind, 
 which got to consider this also, because of its 
 regular recurrence, to be a sign of the stability 
 of the present system, merely looking upon it as 
 something to be taken into the general average 
 and insured against in the usual manner. But 
 within the last few years this latest eternal bour¬ 
 geois providence has failed us. In spite of the 
 
132 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 last partial revival of trade, depression dogs 
 us with closer persistence. The nations whom 
 we assumed would never do anything but pro¬ 
 vide us with raw materials, have become our 
 rivals in manufacture, and our competitors in the 
 world-market; while owing to the fact that Amer¬ 
 ica has enormous stretches of easily tilled virgin 
 soil, which does not need manure, and that the 
 climate of India makes it easy to support life 
 there, those two countries supply us with such 
 large amounts of grain, and at so cheap a rate, 
 that raising it in England has become unprofit¬ 
 able; hence the farmers are poor, and the land¬ 
 lords cannot get the same rents for agricultural 
 land as formerly. The exports have fallen off; 
 towns where a dozen years ago trade was flour¬ 
 ishing and wages high, are now encumbered with 
 a population which they cannot find employment 
 for; and though from time to time there are 
 rumors of improvement in trade, little comes of 
 them, and people are obliged to await some 
 stroke of magic that shall bring us back our old 
 prosperity “of leaps and bounds.” A new com¬ 
 mercial revolution has been for some time sup¬ 
 plementing the first one, and we are now in the 
 epoch of the perfecting of the machines invented 
 in the earlier years of the great industry. Its re¬ 
 sult is the condensation of cognate businesses 
 and vastly improved organization of production. 
 This means the gradual extinction of the “mer¬ 
 chant” or middleman between the manufacturer 
 and the retail dealer, and lastly and especially 
 an extremely rapid progress in the supplant- 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 133 
 
 ii/ /y of hand industry by machinery; so that the 
 time seems not far distant when handicraft will 
 have entirely ceased to exist in the production 
 of utilities. 
 
 The fact is that the commerce of the great in¬ 
 dustries has entered insensibly into its second 
 stage, and sheer cut-throat competition between 
 the different nations has taken the place of the 
 benevolent commercial despotism of the only na¬ 
 tion which was thoroughly prepared to take ad¬ 
 vantage of the first stages of Industrial Revolu¬ 
 tion—Great Britain, to-wit. 
 
 This second stage is assuredly preparing the 
 final one, which will end with the death of the 
 whole bourgeois commercial system. Meanwhile, 
 what is the real social product of the Industrial 
 Revolution? We answer the final triumph of the 
 middle classes, materially, intellectually, and mor¬ 
 ally. As the result of the great political revolu¬ 
 tion in France was the abolition of aristocratic 
 privilege, and the domination in the world of 
 politics of the bourgeoisie, which hitherto had 
 had little to do with it, so the English Industrial 
 Revolution may be said to have created a new 
 commercial middle class hitherto unknown to 
 the world. This class on the one hand consoli¬ 
 dated all the groups of the middle class of the 
 preceding epoch, such as country squires, large 
 and small, big farmers, merchants, manufac¬ 
 turers, shopkeepers, and professional men; and 
 made them so conscious of their solidarity, that 
 the ordinary refined and thinking man of to-day 
 cannot really see any other class at all, but only, 
 
134 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 outside his own class, certain heterogeneous 
 groups to be used as instruments for the further 
 advancement of that class. On the other hand, 
 it has attained such complete domination that 
 the upper classes are merely adjuncts to it an d 
 servants of it. In fact, these also are now of 
 the bourgeoisie, as they are all engaged in com¬ 
 merce in one way or other: thus the higher no¬ 
 bility are all either house-agents, spirit merchants, 
 coal-factors or company-promoters, and would be 
 of no importance without their “businesses/’ 
 Moreover, striving ever to extend itself down¬ 
 wards as well as upwards, the middle class has 
 absorbed so much in that direction, especially 
 within the last thirty years, that it has now noth¬ 
 ing left below it except the mere propertyless 
 proletariat. These last are wholly dependent 
 upon it, utterly powerless before it, until the break 
 up of the system that has created it (the signs 
 of whose beginning we have just noted), shall 
 force them into a revolt against it. In the course 
 of that revolt this great middle class will in its 
 turn be absorbed into the proletariat, which will 
 form a new society in which classes shall have 
 ceased to exist. This is the next Revolution, as 
 inevitable, as inexorable, as the rising of to-mor¬ 
 row’s sun. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 POLITICAL MOVEMENTS IN ENGLAND 
 
 TOURING the French Revolution, especially 
 during its earlier stages, there was a cor¬ 
 responding movement in England. This was 
 partly an intellectual matter, led by a few aristo¬ 
 crats—like the Earl of Stanhope—and had no 
 connection with the life of the people; it was 
 rather a piece of aristocratic Bohemianism, a 
 tendency to which has been seen in various times, 
 even in our own. But it was partly a popular 
 ferment in sympathy with the general spirit of 
 the French Revolution, was widespread, and was 
 looked upon as dangerous by the Government, 
 who repressed the agitation with a high-handed 
 severity which would seem almost incredible in 
 our times. 
 
 The French Revolution naturally brought about 
 a great reaction, not only in absolutist countries, 
 but also in England, the country of Constitu¬ 
 tionalism, and this reaction was much furthered 
 and confirmed by the fall of Napoleon and the 
 restoration of the Bourbons in France, and all 
 the doings and incapacities of the Holy Alliance. 
 We may take as representative names of this 
 
 135 
 
136 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 reaction the Austrian Prince Metternich on the 
 Continent and Lord Castlereagh in England. The 
 stupid and ferocious repression of the govern¬ 
 ments acting under this influence, as well as the 
 limitless corruption by which they were sup¬ 
 ported, were met in England by a corresponding 
 progressive agitation, which was the beginning 
 of the Radicalism. Burdett and Cartwright are 
 representatives of the early days of this agita¬ 
 tion, and later on Hunt, Carlile, Lovett, and 
 others. William Cobbett must also be mentioned 
 as belonging to this period—a man of great liter¬ 
 ary capacity of a kind, and with flashes of in¬ 
 sight as to social matters far before his time, 
 but clouded by violent irrational prejudices and 
 prodigious egotism; withal a peasant rather than 
 a literary man of cultivation—a powerful dis¬ 
 ruptive agent, but incapable of association with 
 others. 
 
 This period of Radical agitation was marked 
 by a piece of violent repression in the shape of 
 the so-called Peterloo Massacre (1819), where 
 an unarmed crowd at a strictly political meeting 
 was charged and cut down by the yeomanry, and 
 eleven people killed outright. 1 
 
 At last, when the country was on the verge of 
 
 civil war, the Reform Act of 1832 secured the 
 
 / / __ 
 
 1 The improvement in our political position since the 
 end of the eighteenth century is sufficiently shown by 
 such examples as those of John Frost, Winterbotham, 
 William Cobbett, and others, who were fined heavily 
 and imprisoned for the simple expressions of opinions 
 that carried with them not the least intention of in¬ 
 citement to revolt. 
 
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 137 
 
 practically complete political emancipation of the 
 new middle class, which then at once quietly set¬ 
 tled down and deserted the proletariat, although 
 the latter had given both its numbers and its 
 blood to aid it in its struggle for political free¬ 
 dom. 
 
 Consequently this agitation, which was partly 
 middle-class and partly popular, was succeeded 
 by the further demands of the proletariat for 
 freedom, in the Chartist movement, which was 
 almost exclusively supported by the people, 
 though some of the leaders—as Feargus O’Con¬ 
 nor and Ernest Jones—belonged to the middle 
 class. Chartism, on the face of it, was nearly 
 as much a politcal movement as the earlier Radi¬ 
 cal one; its programme was largely directed to¬ 
 wards parliamentary reform; but, as we have 
 said, it was a popular movement, and its first 
 motive power was the special temporary suffer¬ 
 ing of the people, due to the disturbance of labor 
 caused by the growth of the machine industry. 
 The electoral and parliamentary reforms of its 
 programme were put forward because it was 
 supposed that if they were carried ultimately, 
 they would affect the material condition of the 
 working classes: at the same time, however, 
 there is no doubt that the pressure of hunger 
 and misery gave rise to other hopes besides the 
 above-mentioned delusion as to reform, and ideas 
 of Socialism were current among the Chartists, 
 though they were not openly put forward on 
 
138 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 their programme. 1 Accordingly the class-instinct 
 of the bourgeoisie saw the social danger that 
 lurked under the apparently political claims of 
 the charter, and so far from its receiving any of 
 the middle-class sympathy which had been ac¬ 
 corded to the Radical agitation, Chartism was 
 looked upon as the enemy, and the bourgeois pro¬ 
 gressive movement was sedulously held aloof 
 from it. It is worthy of note that Chartism was 
 mainly a growth of the Midland and Northern 
 Counties—that is, of the great manufacturing 
 districts newly created—and that it never really 
 flourished in London. In Birmingham the move¬ 
 ment had the greatest force, and serious riots 
 took place there while a Chartist conference was 
 sitting in the town. The movement gave birth to 
 a good deal of popular literature, especially con¬ 
 sidering that the press was very strictly controlled 
 by the Government. 
 
 The Chartist movement went on vigorously 
 enough in the Northern and Midland Counties; 
 but, as stated, it never took much hold on Lon¬ 
 don and the South, where there was opposition 
 between the skilled and unskilled workmen, the 
 former belonging to the trades mostly carried on 
 by handicraft. In the North the industrial revo¬ 
 lution which had produced the factory had mainly 
 done away with this distinction. The insuffi- 
 
 1 The term Socialists was at this time used to indi¬ 
 cate the Utopian Co-operationists, who were blindly 
 opposed to all political movement. There was far more 
 socialism in our sense of the word among the ranks 
 of the Chartists. 
 
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 139 
 
 ciency of its aims, and of knowledge how to effect 
 them, at last found out the weak places in Chart¬ 
 ism. The Chartists were mostly, and necessarily 
 so, quite ignorant of the meaning and scope of 
 Socialism; and the economical development was 
 was not enough advanced to show the real and 
 permanent cause of the industrial distress. With 
 the first amelioration of that distress therefore 
 the Chartist party fell to pieces. But the im¬ 
 mediate external cause of its wreck was the un¬ 
 fortunate schism that arose between the support¬ 
 ers of moral force and physical force in the body 
 itself. For the rest it seems clear enough to us 
 that they had little chance of succeeding on 
 constitutional lines, considering the immense 
 amount of resistance (not all constitutional) with 
 which their demands were met. The historical 
 function of the movement was to express the 
 intense discontent of the working classes with 
 the then state of things; and to pass on the tra¬ 
 dition to our own days. 
 
 It may here be mentioned that the trump- 
 card which the Chartists were always thinking 
 of playing was the organization of a universal 
 strike, under the picturesque title of the Sacred 
 Month. In considering the enormous difficulties, 
 or rather impossibilities of this enterprise, we 
 should remember that its supporters understood 
 that the beginnings of it would be at once re¬ 
 pressed forcibly, and that it would lead directly 
 to civil war. 
 
 From 1842, when the above schism came to a 
 head, Chartism began to die out. Its decay. 
 
140 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 however, was far more due to the change that 
 was coming over the economical state of affairs 
 than even to its incomplete development of prin¬ 
 ciple and ill-considered tactics. Things were set¬ 
 tling down from the dislocation caused by the 
 rise of the great industries. Apart from the 
 fact that the Chartists were gradually worn out 
 by the long struggle, the working people shared 
 in the added wealth brought about by the enor¬ 
 mous expansion of trade, however small that 
 share was; and in consequence became more con¬ 
 tented. The trades unions began to recover from 
 the disasters of 1834, and improved the pros¬ 
 pects of the skilled workmen. So-called co-oper¬ 
 ation began to flourish: it was really an improved 
 form of joint-stockery, which could be engaged in 
 by the workmen, but was and is fondly thought 
 by some to be, if not a shoeing-horn to Socialism, 
 at least a substitute for it; indeed Chartism itself 
 in the end became involved in a kind of half 
 co-operative, half peasant-proprietorship land 
 scheme, which of course proved utterly abortive. 
 
 As the improvement in the condition of the 
 working classes weakened that part of the life 
 of Chartism that depended on mere hunger des¬ 
 peration, so the growing political power of the 
 middle classes and the collapse of the Tory 
 reaction swallowed up the political side of its life. 
 
 Chartism, therefore, flickered out in the years 
 that followed 1842, but its last act was the cele¬ 
 brated abortive threat at revolt which took place 
 in April, 1848. And it must be said that there 
 was something appropriate in such .a last act. 
 
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 141 
 
 For this demonstration was distinctly caused 
 by sympathy with the attacks on absolutism then 
 taking place on the Continent, and Chartism was 
 always on one side of it a phase of the movement 
 which was going on all over Europe, a move¬ 
 ment directed against the reaction which fol¬ 
 lowed on the French Revolution, as represented 
 by the “Holy Alliance” of the absolutist sover¬ 
 eigns against both bourgeoisie and people. 
 
 On the fall of Chartism, the Liberal party— 
 which as an engine of progress was a party 
 without principles or definition, but has been 
 used as a thoroughly adequate expression of Eng¬ 
 lish middle-class hypocrisy, cowardice, and short¬ 
 sightedness—engrossed the whole of the political 
 progressive movement in England, and dragged 
 the working classes along with it, blind as they 
 were to their own interests and the solidarity of 
 labor. This party has shown little or no sym¬ 
 pathy for the progressive movement on the Conti¬ 
 nent, unless when it deemed it connected with 
 current anti-Catholic prejudice. It saw no dan¬ 
 ger in the Gesarism which took the place of the 
 corrupt Constitutionalism of Louis Philippe as 
 the head of the police and stock-jobbing regime 
 that dominated France in the interests of the 
 bourgeoisie, and it hailed Louis Napoleon with 
 delight as the champion of law and order. 
 
 Any one, even a thoughtful person, might 
 have been excused for thinking in the years that 
 followed on 1848 that the party of the people was 
 at last extinguished in England, and that the class 
 Struggle had died out and given place to the 
 
142 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 peaceable rule of the middle classes, scarcely 
 disturbed by occasional bickerings carried on in 
 a lawful manner between Capital and Labor. But, 
 under all this, Socialism was making great strides 
 and developing a new and scientific phase, which 
 at last resulted in the establishment of the Interna¬ 
 tional Association, whose aim was to unite the 
 workers of the world in an organization which 
 should consciously oppose itself to the domination 
 of capitalism. 
 
 The International was inaugurated in England 
 in 1864, at a meeting held in St. Martin’s Hall, 
 London, at which Professor Beesly took the chair. 
 It made considerable progress among the Trades 
 Unions, and produced a great impression (beyond 
 indeed what its genuine strength warranted) on 
 the arbitrary Governments of Europe. It cul¬ 
 minated as to the Socialistic influence it had, in 
 the Commune of Paris, of which we shall treat 
 in a separate chapter. The International did 
 not long outlive the Commune, and once more 
 for several years all proletarian influence was 
 dormant in England, except for what activity 
 was possible among the foreign refugees liv¬ 
 ing there, with whom some few of the 
 English working men had relations. In the year 
 1881, 1 an attempt was made to federate the 
 various Radical clubs of London under the narfte 
 of the Democratic Federation. Part of the het- 
 
 1 Since the history of this part of the movement is so 
 recent that it cannot at present be written in any detail, 
 the authors think it advisable not to mention personal 
 names. 
 
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 143 
 
 erogeneous elements, mainly the mere political 
 radicals, of which this was composed, withdrew 
 from it in 1883; but other elements, connected; 
 with the literary and intellectual side of Socialism, 
 joined it, and soon after the body declared for 
 unqualified Socialism, and took the name of the 
 Social Democratic Federation. This was the 
 first appearance of modern or scientific Socialism 
 in England, and on these grounds excited con¬ 
 siderable public attention, though the movement, 
 being then almost wholly intellectual and literary, 
 had not at that time reached the masses. 
 
 Differences of opinion, chiefly on points of 
 temporary tactics, caused a schism in the body, 
 and a rival, the Socialist League, was formed, 
 both Societies carrying on an active socialist prop¬ 
 aganda, and in process of time often acting in 
 concert. The West-end riots on Monday. Febru¬ 
 ary 8th, 1886, and the consequent trial of four 
 members of the Social Democratic Federation, 
 brought the two organizations much together. A 
 good many branches both of the Federation and 
 the League were founded and carried on with 
 various fortunes. But in the year 1890 dissen¬ 
 sions in the League, caused by a considerable 
 anarchistic element, broke it up. In the mean¬ 
 time the Fabian Society, which took form as a 
 Socialist body about the same time as the League, 
 has been actively engaged in propaganda, di¬ 
 recting its efforts chiefly to forcing existing po¬ 
 litical parties to take notice of social questions-; 
 and largely also to educating middle class persons 
 in Socialism. There are other bodies more or 
 less independent, scattered up and down the coun- 
 
144 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 try, among whom may be mentioned the Bris¬ 
 tol Socialists, Societies in Aberdeen and Glas¬ 
 gow, and the Hammersmith Socialist Society, the 
 latter being an offshoot of the Socialist League. 
 It must not, however, be supposed that the spread 
 of Socialistic doctrine is, in any way, confined to 
 the areas surrounding these local centers of prop¬ 
 aganda ; on the other hand, its influence will be 
 clearly discernible throughout every industrial 
 community. In spite of mishaps and disputes the 
 movement has taken root in England, and Social¬ 
 ism is beginning to be understood by the working 
 classes at large, the Socialistic instinct being now 
 obvious in all strikes and trade disputes, and hav¬ 
 ing caused the growth of a new unionism based 
 on a frank recognition of the class struggle. 
 And, moreover, the governing classes have been 
 forced to turn their attention to the condition 
 of the workers, so that Parliament, however un¬ 
 willingly, can no longer ignore their demands as 
 a class, and all existing parties are bidding for 
 their favor and votes. In fact, what has hap¬ 
 pened to the Socialist agitation is that which hap¬ 
 pens in all movements beginning with insignifi¬ 
 cant minorities. If it has lost somewhat for the 
 present in intention, it has gained enormously 
 in extension, and only awaits increased educa¬ 
 tion and the force of inevitable economic events 
 for it to become general as an opinion; the result 
 of which will be a corporate action, destined to 
 carry the evolution of modern life into the next 
 great stage—the realization of a new society with 
 new politics, ethics, and economics, in short, the 
 transformation of Civilization into Socialism. 
 
V 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 REACTION AND REVOLUTION ON THE CONTINENT 
 
 TTT’HEN the great war which Napoleon waged 
 * * against Europe came to an end by his de¬ 
 feat and ruin, France was once more handed over 
 to the Bourbons, and Europe, as we have already 
 seen, fell into the arms of reaction and sheer 
 absolutism. The Holy Alliance, or union of re¬ 
 actionary monarchs, undertook the enterprise of 
 crushing out all popular feeling, or even anything 
 that could be supposed to represent it in the 
 person of the bourgeois. 
 
 But the French Revolution had shaken absolut¬ 
 ism too sorely for this enterprise to have more 
 than a very partial success even on the surface. 
 The power of absolutism was undermined by 
 various revolutionary societies, mostly (so-called i 
 secret, which attracted to them a great body of 
 sympathy, and in consequence seemed far more 
 numerous and immediately dangerous than they 
 really were. Still there was a great mass of 
 discontent, mostly political in character, and by 
 no means confined to the poorer classes. 
 
 This discontent went on gathering head, till in 
 1830, and again in 1848, it exploded into open 
 
 145 
 
146 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 revolt against autocracy all over Europe. This 
 revolt, we must repeat, was in the main a mere 
 counter-stroke to the reaction that was diligently 
 striving to restore the aristocratic privilege which 
 the French Revolution had abolished, and to 
 maintain what of it had escaped its attack. In 
 1830 the revolt was purely bourgeois in character, 
 and was in no sense social, but, as above said, 
 political. In 1848 it had in some places a strong 
 infusion of the proletarian element, which, how¬ 
 ever, was dominated by middle-class patriotism 
 and ideas which led to the assertion and consoli¬ 
 dation of nationalities. This has gone on ever 
 since, and the feeling still exists and in some 
 cases is even rampant. Poland, Hungary, Italy, 
 Servia, Ireland, and France, as represented by 
 her Chauvinists, have all once and again contrib¬ 
 uted their quotas to this nuisance of “Patriotism,” 
 which has so often in these latter days dragged 
 the red herring overdhe path of the Revolution. 
 
 But a new element was present in these latter 
 revolutionary movements, though at first it did 
 not seem to influence their action much. This 
 was the first appearance in politics of modern 
 or scientific Socialism, in the shape of the Com¬ 
 munist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, first pub¬ 
 lished in 1847. The rise and development of this 
 phase will be dealt with in detail further on; at 
 present we can do no more than call attention to 
 the steady and continuous influence of this last- 
 born Socialism, compared with the rapid extinction 
 of Baboeufs propaganda, although he had a nu¬ 
 merous body of adherents; for this fact marks 
 
REACTION AND REVOLUTION 
 
 147 
 
 a very great advance since the end of the eigh¬ 
 teenth century. 
 
 The general effect, however, at least as seen 
 openly, of these insurrections was little more 
 than the shaking of absolutism and the supplant¬ 
 ing of it in various degrees by middle-class con¬ 
 stitutionalism ; and also, as aforesaid, an added 
 impulse toward the consolidation of nationalities, 
 which later on produced the unification of Italy 
 and of Germany, and the assertion of the inde¬ 
 pendence of the Hungarian state. 
 
 In France the outward effects of the insur¬ 
 rection were most obvious and lasted the longest; 
 but the bourgeois institution that took the place 
 of Louis Philippe’s corrupt monarchy asserted 
 itself tyrannically enough against the proletariat, 
 and in consequence had no strength left to meet 
 the political adventurer, Louis Napoleon, whose 
 plot against the republic received just as much 
 resistance as gave him an excuse for the massacre 
 of December 4th, 1851, by means of which he 
 terrorized France for many years. Notwith¬ 
 standing, as to numbers it was quite insignificant 
 compared with the slaughter which followed the 
 taking of Paris by the bourgeois troops at the 
 time of the fall of the Commune in 1871. 
 
 This successful stroke had really no relation 
 to any foregoing reactionary dictatorship. It 
 even professed to be founded on democratic feel¬ 
 ing, though as a matter of fact it was the ex¬ 
 pression of the non-political side of bourgeois life 
 —the social and commercial side—the ideal of 
 the shopkeeper grown weary of revolutions and 
 
I 
 
 148 SOCIALISM 
 
 anxious to be let alone to make money and enjoy 
 himself vulgarly. Accordingly France settled 
 down into a period of “law and order/’ character¬ 
 ized by the most shameless corruption and re¬ 
 pulsive shoddy splendor. She got at last into 
 full swing of the rule of successful stock-jobbery, 
 already established in England, and carried it on 
 with less hypocrisy than oureselves, and conse^ 
 quently with more open blackguardism. 
 
 To sustain this regime various showy military 
 enterprises were undertaken, some of which it 
 was attempted to invest with a kind of demo¬ 
 cratic sentiment. It was also of some importance 
 to make at least a show of giving employment to 
 the working classes of France. This principally 
 took the form of the rebuilding of Paris and the 
 restoration, or vulgarization, of the mediaeval ca¬ 
 thedrals and public buildings, in which France is 
 richer than any other country; so that this apothe¬ 
 osis of middle-class vulgarity has left abiding 
 tokens of its presence in a loss that can never be 
 repaired. Yet in spite of this militarism and the 
 attempt to gain the support of the proletarians 
 by gifts of “bread and pageants,” discontent 
 of various kinds sprang up and steadily increased. 
 Moreover, the new birth of Socialism was begin¬ 
 ning to bear fruit; the Communistic propaganda 
 got firm hold of the city proletariat of France. 
 Socialism was steadily preached in Paris at La 
 Villette and Belleville, the latter, originally laid 
 out and built upon as an elegant suburb for rich 
 bourgeois, having proved a failure, and become 
 a purely workman's quarters in consequence. 
 
REACTION AND REVOLUTION 
 
 149 
 
 While all this was going on as it were under¬ 
 ground, the Csesarism of the stock-exchange was 
 also beginning to get the worst of it in the game 
 of state-craft, until at last the results of the con¬ 
 solidation of nationalities, which was the chief 
 aim of the bourgeois revolt of 1848, became ob¬ 
 vious in the revival of the old animosities between 
 Germany and France. Bismarck, who had be¬ 
 come the attorney-dictator of Germany, had got 
 to know the weakness of the showy empire of 
 Louis Napoleon, and had a well warranted con¬ 
 fidence in that carefully elaborated machine, the 
 Prussian army. He laid a trap for the French 
 Caesar, who fell into it, perhaps not blindly, 
 but rather driven by a kind of gambler’s last hope, 
 akin to despair. 
 
 A great race war followed, the natural and 
 inevitable outcome of which was the hopeless de¬ 
 feat of the French army, led as it was by self- 
 seekers and corrupt scoundrels of the worst kind, 
 most of whom lacked even that lowest form of 
 honor which makes a Dugald Dalgetty faithful 
 to the colors under which he marches. The Sec¬ 
 ond Empire was swept away. The new Republic 
 proclaimed after the collapse of Sedan still kept 
 up a hopeless resistance to the unbroken strength 
 of Germany—hopeless, since the corruption of 
 the Empire still lived on in the bourgeois re¬ 
 public, as typified in the person of the political 
 gamester, Gambetta. Paris was invested, and 
 taken after a long resistance that reflected infinite 
 credit on the general population, who bore the 
 misery of the siege with prodigious patience and 
 
150 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 courage, but no less disgrace on those who pre¬ 
 tended to organize its defense, but who were 
 really far more inclined to hand over the city to 
 the Germans than allow it to gain a victory un¬ 
 der the auspices of the proletariat. 
 
 All this must be looked upon by Socialists as 
 merely the prelude to the great drama of the 
 Commune, whose aims and influence will form 
 the subject of another chapter. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871, AND THE CONTI¬ 
 NENTAL MOVEMENT FOLLOWING IT 
 
 I 
 
 TN dealing with the great event of the Paris 
 Commune, we must take for granted a knowl¬ 
 edge of the facts, which are to be found in 
 Lissagary’s work, now translated into English 
 by Mrs. Aveling. 
 
 As we have stated before, the International 
 was founded in 1864, under the leadership of 
 Beesly, Marx and Odger. In 1869, at the Con¬ 
 gress of Basel, Marx drew it into the compass 
 of Socialism; and though in England it still re¬ 
 mained an indefinite labor-body, on the Continent 
 it became at once decidedly Socialistic and revolu¬ 
 tionary, and its influence was very consider¬ 
 able. 
 
 The progress of Socialism and the spreading 
 feeling of the solidarity of labor was very clearly 
 shown by the noble protest made by the German 
 Socialists 1 against the war with France, in the 
 teeth of a “patriotic” feeling so strong in appear¬ 
 ance that it might have been expected to silence 
 
 1 They also protested, at the end of the war, against 
 the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. 
 
 151 
 
152 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 any objectors from the first. The result of the 
 war seemed to offer at least a chance for action 
 to the rapidly increasing Socialist party, if they 
 could manage to take advantage of it, and get 
 into their hands the political power; accordingly 
 under guidance of the International, the French 
 Socialists determined to take action if an imme¬ 
 diate opportunity offered. Neither did the oppor¬ 
 tunity fail. The final defeat of the French army 
 at Sedan brought on the fall of the Empire, when 
 Republican France might perhaps have 1 made 
 terms with the invaders, whom the men of the 
 Empire had challenged. But a resistance was 
 organized by Gambetta, at the head of a stock- 
 jobbing clique, whose interests, both commercial 
 and political, forbade them to let the war die out, 
 lest they should find themselves face to face with 
 a people determined to be fleeced no longer. In 
 saying the above we do not deny that this sham 
 patriotism was backed up by a wave of genuine 
 patriotic enthusiasm common to the whole people. 
 The resistance, however, was always quite hope¬ 
 less from a military point of view, and brought 
 the country to the verge of ruin. It also neces¬ 
 sarily involved the German siege of Paris, the 
 result of which was to throw a great deal of 
 power into the hands of the city proletariat, since 
 they at least were in earnest in their opposition 
 to the foreign enemy, and the theatrical resistance 
 necessary to the ambition of the political adven¬ 
 turers who posed as their leaders could not have 
 had a decent face to put upon it without their 
 enthusiasm. In October, while the siege was still 
 
THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871 
 
 153 
 
 at its height, a rising headed by Blanqui nearly 
 succeeded in overthrowing the bourgeois domi¬ 
 nation ; and after the siege the possession of arms, 
 especially cannon, by the proletariat, in the face 
 of the disarmed and disorganized army under the 
 bourgeois, afforded the opportunity desired by the 
 Socialists. On the failure of Thiers’ attempt 
 to disarm Paris—whether he expected it to suc¬ 
 ceed, or only designed it as a trap to enable 
 him to fall with force of arms on the city we 
 will not decide—on this failure the insurrection 
 took place, and the Central Committee, largely 
 composed of members of the International, got 
 into their own hands the executive power, a great 
 deal of which they retained during the whole ex¬ 
 istence of the Commune. Their position was 
 strengthened by the fact that, apart from their 
 aims towards the economical freedom of the pro¬ 
 letariat, they were, in their aspirations towards 
 genuine federalization, in appearance at least, in 
 accord with the Radicals who wished to see an 
 advanced municipalism brought about. 
 
 As the movement progressed, it became more 
 and more obvious that if the resistance to Thiers 
 and the attempt to establish municipal independ¬ 
 ence for Paris was to succeed, it must be through 
 the exercise of Socialist influence on the prole¬ 
 tariat ; the Radicals, therefore, were forced by the 
 march of events into alliance with the Socialists. 
 The Socialist element therefore came to the front, 
 and enactments of a distinctly Socialistic nature 
 were passed, involving the suspension of contract, 
 abolition of rents, and confiscation of means of 
 
154 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 production; and both in these matters and in the 
 decentralization which was almost the watchword 
 of the Commune, the advance from the proceed¬ 
 ings of the earlier revolutionists is clearly marked. 
 Also, although the opportunity for the estab¬ 
 lishment of the Commune was given by the strug¬ 
 gle against foreigners, the international character 
 of its aspirations was shown by the presence of 
 foreigners in its Council, in its offices, and in 
 command of its troops. And though in itself the 
 destruction of the Vendome Column may seem 
 but a small matter, yet considering the impor¬ 
 tance attached generally, and in France particu¬ 
 larly, to such symbols, the dismounting of that 
 base piece of Napoleonic upholstery was another 
 mark of the determination to hold no parley with 
 the old jingo legends. 
 
 It should be noted that the risings that took 
 place in other towns in France were not so much 
 vanquished by the strength of the bourgeoisie, 
 which at first found itself powerless before the 
 people, but rather fell through owing to a want of 
 a fuller development of Socialism and a more 
 vigorous proclamation of its principles. 
 
 The whole revolt was at last drowned in the 
 blood of the workers of Paris. Certainly the 
 immediate result was to crush Socialism for the 
 time by the destruction of a whole generation of 
 its most determined recruits. Nevertheless the 
 very violence and excess of the bourgeois revenge 
 have, as we can now see, tended to strengthen the 
 progress of Socialism, as they have set the seal 
 of tragedy and heroism on the mixed events of 
 
THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871 
 
 155 
 
 the Commune, and made its memory a rallying- 
 point for all future revolutionists. 
 
 The fall of the Commune naturally involved 
 that of the International. The immediate failure 
 of its action was obvious, and blinded people 
 to its indestructible principles. Besides, a period 
 of great commercial prosperity visited the coun¬ 
 tries of Europe at this time. The French mil¬ 
 liards which Germany had won as the prize of 
 war were being turned over and over by the Ger¬ 
 man bourgeois in their merry game of “beggar- 
 my-neighbor.” It was a time now called by the 
 German middle classes themselves the ‘"swindle 
 period.” England was at the height of her era 
 of “leaps and bounds.” Even France, in spite 
 of her being the plundered country, recovered 
 from the condition into which the war had thrown 
 her with a speed that made the plunderer envy her. 
 In short, it was one of those periods which proved 
 to the bourgeois exploiter that he is positively 
 right, in which the bettermost workman grows 
 quite unconscious of the chain that binds him, and 
 is contemptuously regardless of that which lies 
 heavy on the laborer below him, to whom the 
 prosperity or adversity of the rest of the world 
 makes little or no difference. 
 
 Internal dissensions, also, were at work within 
 the International, and at the Congress of the 
 Hague in 1872 it was broken up; for though it 
 still existed as a name for the next year or two, 
 the remaining fragments of it did nothing worth 
 speaking of. 
 
 In Vienna, in 1871, the movement in sympathy 
 
156 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 with the Commune became threatening, but was 
 repressed by the authorities, and several of the 
 prominent members of the party were imprisoned 
 for the part they had taken in a Socialist demon¬ 
 stration—among others, Johann Most and An¬ 
 dreas Scheu. 
 
 For a while after the fall of the Commune the 
 interest in the active side of the movement turns 
 to Germany and Russia. In 1878 Nobiling and 
 Hodel shot at the Emperor William; which event 
 gave the occasion for the attack by Bismarck on 
 the rapidly increasing Socialist party in October, 
 1878, when the repressive laws were enacted 
 which were maintained up to 1890. 
 
 The remarkable organization of the German 
 Socialist party calls here for some notice. Social¬ 
 ism owes its origin in Germany to the Workman’s 
 Party founded by Ferdinand Lasalle in 1862. 
 Lasalle was one of those Semitic geniuses of huge 
 learning and untiring energy who occasionally 
 spring up to astonish the world. He started 
 the party on a basis of State Socialism 
 involviug the resumption by the people of their 
 rights in the land, and there was generally a 
 strong infusion of nationalism in his scheme. Al¬ 
 though in the beginning his party excited great 
 enthusiasm, at his death in 1864 it only nurm 
 bered about five thousand avowed adherents. 
 Four years afterwards the body came under the 
 influence of the International and of Marx, owing 
 to the zeal of Bebel and Liebnecht. Up to the 
 Congress of Eisenach in 1869 the Lasalle party 
 and that of Marx were at daggers drawn. At 
 
THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871 
 
 157 
 
 Gotha in 1875 by a fusion of the two parties the 
 present Social Democratic Party was founded. 
 Since then that party has steadily grown, till it 
 now numbers more than a million and a half of 
 adherents. Owing to this rapid progress and 
 its practical organization the German party must 
 be said to have taken the lead in Socialism since 
 the time of the Commune. 
 
 In Russia the Socialist movement was, on the 
 face of it, mixed up with nationalist and po¬ 
 litical agitation, which was natural in a country 
 in the bonds of the crudest form of absolutism. 
 Nevertheless the ultimate aim of the party is un¬ 
 mistakable, and the propaganda has been carried 
 on with a revolutionary fervor and purity of 
 devotion which have never been surpassed, if they 
 have ever been equalled. The slaying of the 
 Czar on March 13th, 1881, with the tragic scenes 
 that followed it, has been the most dramatic event 
 that the Russian movement has given to the 
 world. The courage and devotion that went to 
 the accomplishment of this lightning stroke, and 
 the fact that it was directed against the acknowl¬ 
 edged representative of reactionary oppression, 
 has had great effect on progressively-minded per¬ 
 sons by the mere force of sympathy, and has 
 directed men's thoughts very much to the strug¬ 
 gles of the Russians against the tyranny which 
 throttles them. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE UTOPISTS : OWEN, SAINT SIMON AND FOURIER. 
 
 TT is now necessary for us to turn for a while 
 from the political progress of Socialism, to 
 note the school of thinkers who preceded the birth 
 of modern scientific or revolutionary Socialism. 
 These men thought it possible to regenerate So¬ 
 ciety by laying before it its shortcomings, fol¬ 
 lies, and injustice, and by teaching through pre¬ 
 cept and example certain schemes of reconstruc¬ 
 tion built up from the aspirations and insight of 
 the teachers themselves. They had not learned 
 to recognize the sequence of events that forces 
 social changes on mankind whether they are con¬ 
 scious of its force or not, but believed that their 
 schemes would win their way to general adoption 
 by men’s perception of their inherited reasonable¬ 
 ness. They hoped to convert people to Socialism, 
 to accepting it consciously and formally, by show¬ 
 ing them the contrast between the confusion and 
 misery of civilization, and the order and happi¬ 
 ness of the world which they foresaw. 
 
 From the elaborate and detailed schemes of 
 future Society which they built up they have been 
 called the Utopists, The representatives of the 
 
 158 
 
THE UTOPISTS 
 
 159 
 
 different phases of this school are three most 
 remarkable men, born within a few years 
 of each other, whose aspirations and insight did, 
 in their day, a very great deal to further the 
 progress of Socialism, in spite of the incomplete¬ 
 ness of their views. 
 
 Robert Owen was born at Newton, Montgom¬ 
 eryshire, in 1771, of a lower middle-class family. 
 He became a successful manufacturer through 
 his own industry and quick-wittedness in the be¬ 
 ginning of the rise of the Great Machine In¬ 
 dustries, when “manufacturing” was advancing 
 by “leaps and bounds.” He was a born philan¬ 
 thropist in the better sense of the word, and from 
 the first showed in all matters unbounded gener¬ 
 osity and magnanimity. In the year 1800, when 
 he was not yet thirty, he became the manager 
 of the New Lanark Mills, and set to work on 
 his first great experiment, which was briefly the 
 conversion of a miserable, stupid, and vicious 
 set of people into a happy industrious, and or¬ 
 derly community, acting on the theory that man is 
 the creature of his surroundings, and that by 
 diligent attention to the development of his na¬ 
 ture he can be brought to perfection. In this ex¬ 
 periment he was entirely successful, but it was not 
 in him to stop there, as the plain words 1 he said 
 of his success showed clearly enough: “Yet these 
 
 1 In 1806, when owing to the rise in cotton he could 
 not continue manufacturing, he stopped the mills and 
 paid his people their full wages till he could go on 
 again in four months’ time, a proceeding that cost him 
 £7,000. 
 
160 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 men were my slaves/' He took part in all kinds 
 of projects of a philanthropic nature, still found¬ 
 ing all his action on his theory of the perfectibility 
 of man by the amelioration of his surroundings, 
 and became the first great champion of co-oper¬ 
 ation, although he did not suppose, as the co- 
 operators of the present day do, that anything 
 short of universal co-operation would solve the 
 social question. In 1815 he pressed a meeting 
 of Glasgow manufacturers to petition Parliament 
 to shorten the hours of labor in the cotton mills, 
 and the change which he experienced from the 
 approbation of the governing classes to their rep¬ 
 robation may very well date from that 4 proceeding, 
 as a bourgeois biographer of his hints. But 
 he still kept his position as a popular philanthror 
 pist, even after his declaration in favor of co¬ 
 operation, until he at last cut himself off from 
 respectability by openly attacking Respectability 
 through its received religion (August 21st, 1816), 
 from which date onward he was scouted by all 
 that “Society,” of which he was now the declared 
 enemy. But he was in nowise daunted. In 1823 
 he proposed communistic villages as a remedy 
 for the distress in Ireland. He established, in 
 1832, an exchange in Gray’s Inn Road, in which 
 labor was equitably exchanged against labor; in 
 1825 he bought New Harmony from a com¬ 
 munity already established there (the Rappites), 
 and made his great experiment in living in com¬ 
 mon ; and late in life he published his Book of 
 the New Moral World, which contains the ex¬ 
 position of his doctrine. 
 
THE UTOPISTS 
 
 161 
 
 It will be thus seen that he was unwearied in 
 practical experiments. His shortcoming was the 
 necessary one of the Utopist—a total disregard 
 of the political side of progress. He failed to see 
 that his experiments, useful as they were from 
 that point of view, could never develop out of 
 the experimental stage as long as the constitution 
 of Society implies the upholding of the so-called 
 “rights of property.” He ignored also the an¬ 
 tagonism of classes which necessarily exists un¬ 
 der this system, and which in the long run must 
 bring about the Socialism that he, the most gen¬ 
 erous and best of men, spent his whole life in 
 attempting to realize. He died in 1858. 
 
 Saint Simon was born of a noble family at 
 Paris in 1760. He acquired and ran through a 
 fortune, deliberately experimenting in the vari¬ 
 ous forms of “life” from extravagance to abject 
 poverty. There was in him none of that tendency 
 to practical experiment in quasi-Socialistic 
 schemes which characterized Robert Owen. His 
 philosophy was mingled with a mysticism which 
 had a tendency to increase—a tendency to form 
 a new religion rather than to realize a new condi¬ 
 tion of life—and which was carried into the ab¬ 
 surdities of a kind of worship by his immediate 
 followers, more or less imitated by the Positiv¬ 
 ists of our own day, whose founder, August 
 Comte, was his most cherished disciple. His So¬ 
 cialism was of a vague kind, and admitted the 
 existence of classes of talent as expressed by the 
 motto of Saint Simonism, “From each according 
 to his capacity; to each according to his deeds.” 
 
162 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 In spite, however, of the tendency to mysticism, 
 showed singular flashes of insight in matters his¬ 
 torical and economic, and intellectually was cer¬ 
 tainly ahead of Robert Owen. He may be said to 
 have set himself the task of learning all life by 
 whatever means and at whatever expense, in order 
 to devote himself to the new religion, “whose 
 great aim is the swiftest possible amelioration of 
 the moral and physical condition of the poorest 
 and most numerous class.” 
 
 Frederick Engels well says of him: “As early 
 as his Letters from Geneva, Saint Simon laid 
 down that all men ought to work, and that the 
 Reign of Terror had been the reign of the non¬ 
 possessing masses. To face the fact in 1802 that 
 the French Revolution was a struggle between the 
 noblesse, the bourgeoisie, and the non-possessing 
 classes was a discovery of genius. In 1816 he 
 asserted that politics were but the science of pro¬ 
 duction, and predicted their absorption by 
 economy. The knowledge that economic condi¬ 
 tions serve as the base of political institutions only 
 shows itself here in the germ; nevertheless, this 
 proposition contains clearly the conversion of the 
 political government of men into an administra¬ 
 tion of things and a direction of the process of 
 production; that is to say, the abolition of the 
 State, of which such a noise has since been 
 made.” 
 
 Internationalism also was clearly enunciated 
 by Saint Simon. We quote Engels again: “With 
 an equal superiority over the views of his contem¬ 
 poraries, he declared in 1814, immediately after 
 
THE UTOPISTS 
 
 163 
 
 the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 
 1815, during the war of the hundred days, that 
 the sole guarantee of the peace and prosperous 
 development of Europe, was an alliance between 
 France and England, and of those two countries 
 with Germany. Certainly it needed a courage 
 by no means common to preach to the French of 
 1815 alliance with the victors at Waterloo.” 
 
 It is worth noting that one of the schemes of 
 the Saint Simonians, which was most ridiuculed 
 at the time, was the cutting of the Isthmus of 
 Suez and Panama, and that M. de Lesseps was a 
 Saint Simonian. 
 
 Saint Simon died in great poverty in 1825, with 
 words of hope for the future of the party on his 
 lips. 
 
 Charles Fourier was born in 1772 at Lyons; 
 his father was a draper. He lost his property in 
 the Revolution, and afterwards went into busi¬ 
 ness as a broker. Amidst his dealings with So¬ 
 ciety, he was early struck by the shortcomings 
 and injustices of individualism and competition. 
 In his first book, The Theory of the Four Move¬ 
 ments, he elaborates the proposition that human 
 nature is perfectible through the free play of the 
 appetites and passions, and asserts that misery 
 and vice spring from the restraints imposed by 
 Society. His criticism of modern Society is most 
 valuable as anticipating that of scientific Social¬ 
 ism ; unlike his contemporaries he has an insight 
 into the historical growth of mankind: “He di¬ 
 vides it into four periods of development, Sav- 
 agery, Barbarism, Patriarchalism, and Civiliza- 
 
164 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 tion, meaning by the latter the Bourgeois Civili¬ 
 zation,” 1 His saying, “In civilization poverty is 
 born even of superabundance,” may well be 
 noted in these days, and compared with Robert 
 Owen’s in 1816, “Our best customer, the war, is 
 dead.” 
 
 As a basis of the reconstruction of Society, 
 Fourier advocated Industrial Co-operation; but 
 here his Utopianism led him into the trip of form¬ 
 ulating dogmatically an elaborate scheme of life 
 in all its details, a scheme which could never be 
 carried out, however good the principles on which 
 it was based might be. His proposal arranges 
 for phalansteries as the unit of co-operation, in 
 which all life and all industry, agricultural and 
 other, should be carried on, and all details are 
 carried out by him most minutely, the number of 
 each phalanstery being settled at 1,600 souls. The 
 most valuable idea was the possibility and neces¬ 
 sity of apportioning due labor to each capacity, 
 and thereby assuring that it should be always 
 pleasurable, and his dictum that children, who 
 generally like making dirt-pies and getting into 
 a mess, should do the dirty work of the commu¬ 
 nity, may at least be looked on as an illustration 
 of this idea, though laid down as a formal law. 
 His system was not one of pure equality, but ad¬ 
 mitted distinctions between rich and (compara¬ 
 tively) poor, and advocated a fantastic division of 
 wealth between labor, capital, and talent. The 
 
 1 Frederick Engels in Socialisms Utopique et Social¬ 
 isms Scisntifique, as also the quotations above. 
 
THE UTOPISTS 
 
 165 
 
 abolition of marriage was a point he laid special 
 stress upon. 
 
 In 1812 Fourier’s mother died and left him. 
 some property, and he retired into the country to 
 write his Treatise on the Association of Do¬ 
 mesticity and Agriculture. Afterwards he came 
 to Paris again, became a clerk in an American 
 firm, and composed in 1830 his New Industrial 
 World. It is lamentable to have to relate that 
 in 1831 he wrote attacking both Owen and Saint 
 Simon as charlatans, in spite of the curious points 
 of resemblance he had to both of them. He died 
 in 1837, but not till he had founded a school, of 
 which Victor Considerant, author of the Desti¬ 
 ne e Sociale, was,the most distinguished member. 
 The Fourierists started a paper in 1832, which 
 expired in two years, but was revived in 1836, and 
 finally suppressed by Government in 1850. A 
 scheme for realizing the phalanstery experiment¬ 
 ally was set on foot in 1832 by a deputy of 
 France, but it failed for lack of funds; so that of 
 the three great Utopists, Owen was the only one 
 who had the fortune, good or bad as it may be 
 considered, of seeing his schemes tried by ex¬ 
 perience. Cabet, indeed, a revolutionist of ’48, 
 founded a community in America under the name 
 of Icaria, which was (and is, for it still exists) 
 more nearly an approach to genuine Communism 
 than any of the other communities which have 
 owed their origin to Utopian Socialism. Of these 
 communities there remains a word to be said as a 
 warning to those who are young in the movement. 
 Although as experiments in association something 
 
166 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 may be learned from them, their conditions of life 
 have no claim to the title of Communism, which 
 most unluckily has often been applied to them. 
 Communism can never be realized till the present 
 system of Society has been destroyed by the 
 workers taking hold of the political power. When 
 that happens, it will mean that Communism is on 
 the point of absorbing and transmuting Civiliza¬ 
 tion all the world over. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE TRANSITION FROM THE UPTOPISTS TO • 
 MODERN SOCIALISM 
 
 /~\ F the Socialist thinkers who serve as a kind 
 of link between the Utopists and the school 
 of the Socialism of historical evolution, or scien¬ 
 tific Socialists by far the most noteworthy figure 
 is Proudhon, who was born at Besangon in 1809. 
 By birth he belonged to the working class, his 
 father being a brewer’s cooper, and he himself 
 as a youth followed the occupation of cowherd-' 
 ing. 
 
 In 1838, however, he published an essay on 
 general grammar, and in 1839 he gained a schol¬ 
 arship to be held for three years, a gift of one 
 Madame Suard to his native, town. The result 
 of this advantage was his most important though 
 far from his most voluminous work, published 
 the same year as the essay which Madame 
 Suard’s scholars were bound to write: it bore the 
 title of What is Property t ( Qu’est-ce que la pro¬ 
 priety?) his answer being, Property is Robbery 
 {La propriete est le vol). 
 
 As may be imagined, this remarkable essay 
 caused much stir and indignation, and Proudhon 
 was censured by the Besangon Academy for its 
 
168 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 production, narrowly escaping a prosecution. In 
 1841 he was tried at Besangon for a letter he 
 wrote to Victor Considerant, the Fourierist, but 
 was acquitted. In 1846 he wrote his Philosophie 
 de la Misere (Philosophy of Poverty), which re¬ 
 ceived an elaborate reply and refutation from 
 Karl Marx. 
 
 In 1847 he went to Paris. In the Revolution of 
 1848 he showed himself a vigorous controversial¬ 
 ist, and was elected Deputy for the Seine. He 
 wrote numerous articles in several journals, 
 mostly criticisms of the progress of the revolu¬ 
 tion. In the Chamber he proposed a tax of one- 
 third to be levied on all interest and rent, which 
 was, as a matter of course, rejected. He also 
 put forward a scheme for a mutual credit bank, 
 by which he hoped to simplify exchange and re¬ 
 duce interest to a vanishing point; but this scheme 
 was also rejected. 
 
 After the failure of the revolution of ’48, 
 Proudhon was imprisoned for three years, dur¬ 
 ing which time he married a young woman of the 
 working class. 
 
 In 1858 he fully developed his system of 
 “Mutualism” in his last work, entitled Justice in 
 the Revolution and the Church. In consequence 
 of the publication of this book he had to retire 
 to Brussels, but was amnestied in 1860, came back 
 to France, and died at Passy in 1865. 
 
 Proudhon’s opinions and works may be broadly 
 divided into two periods: In his What is Prop¬ 
 erty? his position is that of a communist pure and 
 simple; but after this one clear development of 
 
TRANSITIONAL UTOPISTS 
 
 169 
 
 a definite thesis, we meet in his writings, and we 
 must add, in his political actions also, with so 
 much paradox that it is next to impossible to for¬ 
 mulate in brief any definite Proudhonian doc¬ 
 trine. At one time a communist, at another the 
 vehement opponent of Communism; at one time 
 professing anarchy, at another lending himself 
 to schemes of the crudest State socialism; at 
 one time an enthusiastic theist, at another ap¬ 
 parently as strong an atheist; in one passage of 
 his works giving his eager adhesion to Auguste 
 Comte’s worship of women, in another a decided 
 contemner of the female sex—it is with a sense 
 of confusion that one rises from the perusal of 
 his productions. 
 
 His connection with the revolution of ’48 seems 
 to have been the turning-point in his history; in 
 his address to the electors of the Seine, in which 
 he put forward the scheme for a credit bank 
 backed by a number of decrees of a State-social¬ 
 istic nature, and strongly smacking of Bismarck, 
 he announces himself as the man who said Prop¬ 
 erty is Robbery, says that he still maintains that 
 opinion, and then goes on to defend the rights of 
 property which he had so successfully annihi¬ 
 lated in his first work. 
 
 But as to his political career, the element he 
 had to work in was an impossible one for the 
 success of a man holding definite socialistic ideas. 
 On the one hand were the Jacobins with their 
 archaeological restorations of the ideas and poli¬ 
 tics of 1793; on the other Socialism showing 
 itself, taking hold of people’s minds, but attempt- 
 
170 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 ing to realize its doctrines by crude, dislocated, 
 and consequently hopeless schemes of action. 
 Into all these affairs Proudhon looked shrewdly 
 and with insight, and his bitter criticisms of 
 the confusion of the period were shown by the 
 event to have been well founded. 
 
 Proudhon defended the modern family and 
 monogamy in its strictest sense, and does not 
 seem to have troubled himself to study the his¬ 
 tory of those institutions even superficially: in 
 short, he seems to have been singularly lacking 
 in the historical sense, and had not formed any 
 conception of the evolution of society. Those who 
 read his works will find themselves forced to re¬ 
 turn to his first essay, What is Property? if they 
 are seeking in him for any consistent series of 
 ideas. He was an eager and rough controver¬ 
 sialist, and his style is brilliant and attractive in 
 spite of its discursiveness. Throughout his life 
 he was thoroughly single-hearted and disinter¬ 
 ested. In spite of his inconsistencies much of his 
 teaching has lived, especially the side of it that 
 thought that economic society must be based on 
 the mutual exchange of services, and the equality 
 of the reward of labor. Proudhon had a great 
 influence on the French proletariat in the latter 
 years of his life and in those immediately follow¬ 
 ing his death. This influence is now completely 
 gone. In spite of his recurrence to the crudest 
 ideas of authoritative repression, he is the pro¬ 
 tagonist of the individualist anarchist school 
 represented to-day by Mr. Benjamin Tucker and 
 
/ 
 
 TRANSITIONAL UTOPISTS 171 
 
 by his paper Liberty, published at Boston, U. 
 S. A. 
 
 We may now mention the names of two men 
 of no great importance in themselves, but worth 
 noting as forerunners of the Sentimental Social¬ 
 ists and Christian Socialists of the present day. 
 Hugues Felicite Robert de Lamennais (born 
 1782, died 1854) is the type of the Christian So¬ 
 cialist: he was intended for a priest from the 
 first, and duly took orders. He began by efforts 
 to reform the Catholic Church, so as to make it 
 an effective instrument for happiness and social 
 morality and reform. He expected to be helped 
 and encouraged by the clergy in these efforts, and 
 at first, before they perceived their real tendency, 
 he received some support from them. At last, in 
 his paper L‘Avenir (the future), he took so de¬ 
 cidedly a democratic turn that he incurred the 
 animosity of the whole Church, especially of the 
 then Pope, Gregory XVI. The signal for his 
 complete rupture with the Church, however, was 
 the publication (in 1834) of his Paroles d’nn 
 Croyant (“Words of a Believer”), which the 
 Pope characterized as “small in size but immense 
 in perversity.” After that he became thoroughly 
 democratic or even Communistic, as Communism 
 was then understood. A series of political works 
 and pamphlets followed, all in the sense , of hfs 
 new departure. He started, in 1848, two papers, 
 one after another, which were suppressed. He 
 sat in the Republican Constituent Chamber until 
 the coup d’etat; and, while Deputy, drew up for 
 the Left a plan of Constitution which was re- 
 
SOCIALISM 
 
 172 
 
 jected as too revolutionary. He was buried by 
 his own direction without ecclesiastical rites. 
 
 Pierre le Roux (born 1798, died 1871) was 
 originally a disciple of Saint Simon. In 1840 he 
 published his most important work, De l’ Human - 
 ite, whence the name of his school, the Humani¬ 
 tarians. He joined George Sand and Niardof in 
 a literary review, and it was owing to this con¬ 
 nection that the humanitarian tendencies of some 
 of her novels are to be traced. In 1843 he set 
 on foot a co-operative printing association, and 
 started a journal advocating co-operation, or as 
 he termed it, “the pacific solution of the problem 
 of the proletariat.” He also sat in the Republi¬ 
 can Chamber of 1848: he was exiled in 1851 and 
 lived in Jersey, not returning to France till 1869. 
 He died in Paris under the Commune, and two 
 of its members were deputed to attend his fu¬ 
 neral, in the words of the Journal OfUciel, “not in 
 honor of the partisan of the mystical ideas of 
 which we now feel the evil, but of the politician 
 who courageously undertook the defense of the 
 vanquished after the days of June.” This is an 
 allusion to the unpractical and non-political ten¬ 
 dency of his teaching, which undertook to reform 
 society by'the inculcation of morality blended 
 with mysticism, the result of which was to be the 
 gradual spread of voluntary industrial co-opera¬ 
 tion. 
 
 We finish this series with the well-known name 
 of Louis Blanc, a personage more important than 
 the last-named; and more definitely Socialistic in 
 principles than either he or Lamennais, though 
 
TRANSITIONAL UTOPISTS 173 
 
 his political career finished in a way unworthy of 
 those principles. It should be remembered, how¬ 
 ever, that he never grasped the great truth that 
 only through the class struggle can the regenera¬ 
 tion of society be accomplished. He was born 
 in 1813, of a middle-class family which, on the 
 maternal side, was Corsican, and an incident of 
 the relations between him and his brother 
 Charles is said to have suggested to Dumas his 
 famous novelette and play of the Corsican 
 ' Brothers. 
 
 In 1838 he quarreled with the proprietors of 
 the journal of which he was editor, Le Bonsens, 
 on the subject of the railways then being pro¬ 
 jected, he maintaining that these ought to be 
 owned and managed by the State, and retired 
 from the editorship in consequence. 
 
 In 1840 he published his Organization of La¬ 
 bor, the ideas of which he attempted to realize 
 in the famous “National Workshops,” by which 
 he is best known. In this work he put forward 
 the genuine Socialistic maxim of “From each 
 according to his capacity; to each according to 
 his needs” as the basis of the production of a true 
 society. 
 
 He took an active part in the Revolutionary 
 Government of 1848, and got an edict passed 
 abolishing the punishment of death for political 
 offenses. 
 
 In 1848 he got the National Workshops 
 founded. These failed; but their failure was not 
 necessarily due to anything wrong in Louis 
 Blanc’s conception, imperfect as it was: but to 
 
m 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 the fact that Bethmont, the Minister of Trade 
 and Agriculture, had intentionally organized 
 them for failure, inasmuch as it was not articles 
 of real and prime necessity, or even those for 
 which there was a genuine demand which were 
 allowed to be produced in them, but merely arti¬ 
 cles outside the true commercial market; the ob¬ 
 ject being, as in our prisons, not to interfere with 
 the “legitimate” trade and industry of the coun¬ 
 try. Under such circumstances they naturally 
 caused a heavy drain on the resources of the Re¬ 
 public. Loud demands were made by the middle 
 classes for their suppression, to which the Gov¬ 
 ernment at last listened, and their imminent 
 abolition was one of the causes which led to the 
 insurrection of June, 1848. 
 
 In consequence of the events of June, Louis 
 Blanc was compelled to flee from France to Eng¬ 
 land, where he wrote his History of the French 
 Revolution. 
 
 He returned to France in 1869, was elected to 
 the legislative body, but played only a subordi¬ 
 nate part in the stirring times that followed. It 
 remains, indeed, an indelible stain on his charac¬ 
 ter that he deserted the cause of the people in the 
 days of March, 1871, leaving Paris to sit amongst 
 the “Liberals” in the reactionary Chamber at 
 Versailles. 
 
 He died in 1882, having outlived his reputation 
 and his influence. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM—KARL MARX 
 
 np HE foregoing chapters on earlier Socialists 
 A may be regarded as leading up to the full 
 development of the complete Socialist theory, or 
 as it is sometimes called, “scientific” Socialism. 
 The great exponent of this theory, and the au¬ 
 thor of the most thorough criticism of the capi¬ 
 talistic system of production, is the late Dr. Karl 
 Marx. 
 
 He was born in 1818 at Treves, his father be¬ 
 ing a baptized Jew holding an official position in 
 that city. He studied for the law in the Univer¬ 
 sity of Bonn, passing his examination with high 
 honors in 1840. In 1843 he married Jenny von 
 Westphalen, sister of the well-known Prussian 
 statesman of that name. Philosophy and political 
 economy, with especial reference to the great so¬ 
 cial problems of the age, were his special studies 
 on leaving the university. These studies led him 
 towards Socialism, the result of which was that 
 he felt compelled to decline the offer of an im¬ 
 portant Government post. About this time he 
 left Treves for Paris, where he became co-editor 
 with Arnold Ruge of the Dcutsch-Frcmzosische 
 Jahrbiicher, and he also edited the Socialist jour- 
 
176 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 nal Vorwdrts ; but in less than a twelvemonth he 
 was compelled to leave France for Brussels. In 
 March, 1848 he was driven from Belgium and 
 fled to Cologne, where the revolutionary ferment 
 was at its height. He at once undertook the edi¬ 
 torship of the Rheinische Zeitung, the leading 
 revolutionary journal, which was suppressed on 
 the collapse of the revolutionary movement in 
 1849. 
 
 We should mention that in 1847, in conjunc¬ 
 tion with his life-long friend, Frederic Engels, 
 he put forward the celebrated “Communist Mani¬ 
 festo,” which subsequently served as the basis 
 of the International Association. 
 
 After 1849 he went to Paris again, where he 
 continued but a short time, and then left France 
 for London, remaining there with brief intermis¬ 
 sions till his death, which took place in the spring 
 of 1883. 
 
 The principal part he played in political action 
 during his sojourn in England was the organiza¬ 
 tion of the International Association. 
 
 The most important among his works besides 
 Das Kapital, are Die Heilige Familie, written in 
 conjunction with Frederic Engels ; the Misere de 
 la Philosophic, the answer to Proudhon men¬ 
 tioned in our last chapter; 18 Brumaire, an anti- 
 Napoleonic pamphlet; and Zur Kritik der Po- 
 litischer Economic, which laid the foundation for 
 his great work, Das Kapital. 
 
 The importance of this latter work makes it 
 necessary for us to indicate the contents of the 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 177 
 
 principal chapters, so as to form a brief sketch 
 of the Socialist economy. 1 
 
 Part I. deals with Commodities and Money. 
 The first chapter defines a commodity. A com¬ 
 modity, according to Marx, is briefly expressed 
 as a socially useful product of labor which stands 
 in relation of exchange to other useful products 
 of labor. The value of such a commodity is 
 primarily the amount of necessary social labor 
 contained in it: that is to say, the average amount 
 of labor carried through a certain portion of 
 time necessary to its production in a given state 
 of society. The student must take special note 
 that when Marx uses the word value by itself 
 it is always employed in this sense, that is, to put 
 it in a shorter form, as embodied average human 
 labor. The term use-value explains itself. Ex¬ 
 change-value means the actual relation of one 
 commodity to another or to all others in the 
 market. The ultimate issue of the various ex¬ 
 pressions of value is the money-form: but in the 
 words of Marx the step to the money-form “con¬ 
 sists in this alone, that the character of direct and 
 universal exchangeability—in other words, that 
 the universal equivalent form—has now by social 
 custom become identified with the substance 
 gold.” 
 
 The second chapter deals with exchange. Ex- 
 
 1 We must remind the reader that we do not profess 
 to offer more than some hints to the student of Marx. 
 Anything approaching to an abstract of Das Kapital 
 would take up space far beyond the limits of the pres¬ 
 ent little work. 
 
178 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 change, says Marx, presupposes guardians or 
 owners of commodities, since these cannot go to 
 market of themselves. An article possesses for 
 the owner no use-value where he seeks to ex¬ 
 change it: if it did, he would not seek to ex¬ 
 change it. “All commodities,” says Marx, “are 
 non-use values for their owners and use-values 
 for their non-owners. Consequently they must 
 all change hands. But this change of hands is 
 what constitutes their exchange, and the latter 
 puts them in relation with each other as values, 
 and realizes them as values. Hence commodities 
 must be realized as values before they can be re¬ 
 alized as use-values.” 
 
 Commodities, then, find their universal value 
 represented by one commodity from among them, 
 which has in itself no use-value unless it be that 
 of embodying and of symbolizing the abstract 
 quality of value. 
 
 Chapter III. deals with the circulation of com¬ 
 modities under the money-form. Here Marx 
 very justly observes, “It is because all commodi¬ 
 ties as values are realized human labor, and there¬ 
 fore commensurable, that their values can be 
 measured by one and the same special commodity, 
 and the latter be converted into the common 
 measure of their values— i. e. into money. Money 
 as a measure of value is the phenomenal form 
 that must of necessity be assumed by that meas¬ 
 ure of value which is immanent in commodities, 
 labor-time.” 
 
 This long and important chapter proceeds to 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 179 
 
 discuss the theory of circulating money or of cur¬ 
 rency at considerable length and in great detail. 
 
 The problem to be resolved is as follows: The 
 owner of money has to buy his commodities at 
 their value, and to sell them at their value, and 
 nevertheless at the end of the process to realize 
 a surplus. This is the end and aim of his ex¬ 
 istence as a capitalist, and if he does not accom¬ 
 plish it, he is as a capitalist a failure. So that 
 his development from the mere money-owner to 
 the full-blown capitalist has to take place at once 
 within the sphere of circulation and without it: 
 that is, he must follow the law of the exchange 
 of commodities, and nevertheless must act in ap¬ 
 parent contradiction to that law. This problem 
 cannot be solved merely by means of the money 
 which he owns, the value of which is, so to say, 
 petrified. As Ricardo says, “In the form of 
 money, capital has no profit.” As money, it can 
 only be hoarded. 
 
 Neither can the surplus originate in the mere 
 re-sale of the commodity, “which does no more 
 than transform the article from its bodily form 
 back into its money-form.” The only alterna¬ 
 tive left is that the change should originate in 
 the use-value of the article bought with the money 
 in the first instance, and on which the capitalist 
 has to operate. 
 
 “In order to be able to extract value from the 
 consumption of a commodity, our friend Money¬ 
 bags must be so lucky as to find within the sphere 
 of circulation, in the market, a commodity whose 
 use-value possesses the peculiar property of be- 
 
180 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 ing a source of value, whose actual consumption 
 therefore is itself an embodiment of labor, and, 
 consequently, a creation of value. The possessor 
 of money does find on the market such a special 
 commodity in capacity of labor, or labor-power. ,, 
 
 By labor-power or the capacity of labor, Marx 
 understands the whole of the mental and physi¬ 
 cal capacities in a human being which are brought 
 into action in the production of commodities; in 
 short, the man and all that is in him as a wealth- 
 producing machine. 
 
 Now in order that the possessor of money 
 should find this necessity to the accomplishment 
 of his end and aim—viz., labor-power as a com¬ 
 modity of the market, various conditions are 
 requisite. 
 
 The man who is to exercise the labor-power for 
 the capitalists’ benefit—the laborer—must be 
 “free,” that is, his labor must be at his own dis¬ 
 posal, and also he must have nothing else to dis¬ 
 pose of for his livelihood but his labor-power. 
 On the other hand, any one who has to live by 
 selling commodities other than labor-power must 
 own the means of production, and also the means 
 of subsistence while the commodities are being 
 got ready for the market, and being converted 
 into money. 
 
 As to the value of this article necessary to the 
 life of the capitalist, this labor-power, it is esti¬ 
 mated like the value of every other commodity by 
 the average time necessary for its production or 
 reproduction; that is, the average time necessary 
 in a given state of society; and in plain language 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 181 
 
 this reproduction of labor-power means the main¬ 
 tenance of the laborer. “Given the individual, the 
 production of labor-power consists in the repro¬ 
 duction of himself—or his maintenance.” 
 
 Labor-power is realized only in action, that is, 
 when it has become actual labor, and is producing 
 a commodity; so that, “the value of labor-power 
 resolves itself into the value of a definite quan¬ 
 tity of the means of subsistence. It therefore 
 varies with the value of those means, or with the 
 quantity of labor requisite for their production.” 
 
 The minimum limit of the value of labor- 
 power is therefore determined by the value 
 of these means. If the price of labor-power 
 falls below that minimum, it is destroyed: 
 a higgling as to its price has to be gone through 
 between the buyer and the seller, and the price 
 is fixed by contract, though it is not realized until 
 the labor-power is used up or embodied in the 
 article produced by it. From what is stated above, 
 it will be seen that this contract is made between 
 two parties; on the one hand the workman or 
 producer, who has no means of producing, on the 
 other the possessor of money, who has all the 
 means necessary for the producer to effectively 
 exercise his faculty of production, and has there¬ 
 fore become a capitalist. “He who was before 
 the money-owner now strides in front as a capi¬ 
 talist; the possessor of labor-power follows as 
 his laborer. The one with an air of importance, 
 smirking, intent on business: the other timid and 
 holding back, like one who is bringing his own 
 
182 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 hide to market, and has nothing to expect but— 
 a hiding.” 
 
 The labor-process necessary to capitalism ex¬ 
 hibits two characteristic phenomena: first the la¬ 
 borer works under the control of a capitalist, and 
 secondly the product of the laborer is the prop¬ 
 erty of a capitalist, and not of the laborer, its 
 immediate producer. This product appropriated 
 by the capitalist is a use-value, “as for example 
 yarn, or bootssays Marx with a grin, “but al¬ 
 though boots are in one sense the basis of all so¬ 
 cial progress, and our capitalist is a decided 
 'progressist/ the capitalist does not for his special 
 purpose look upon them as boots, or any other 
 use-value. He has primarily two objects in view: 
 first he wants to produce a use-value, not, again, 
 for the sake of its use, but in order that he may 
 exchange it; and next, in order that his exchange 
 may be fruitful to him, he wants to produce a 
 commodity the value of which shall be greater 
 than the sum of the values used in producing it 
 —that is, the means of production and the labor- 
 power.” 
 
 This he is able to accomplish as follows: He 
 buys the use of the labor-power of the workman 
 for a day, while a certain duration of labor in the 
 day is enough to reproduce the workman’s ex¬ 
 pended labor-power—that is: to keep him alive. 
 But the human machine is in all cases capable 
 of laboring for more hours in the day than is 
 necessary for this result, and the contract be¬ 
 tween the capitalist and the laborer, as understood 
 in the system under which those two classes ex- 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 183 
 
 ist, implies that the exercise of the day’s labor- 
 power shall exceed this duration necessary for 
 reproduction, and it is a matter of course that the 
 buyer of the commodity labor-power should do 
 as all buyers of commodities do—consume it al¬ 
 together for his own advantage. 1 
 
 It is by this avocation, the buying of labor- 
 power in the market, and the consumption of all 
 the results of its exercise beyond what is neces¬ 
 sary for its reproduction, that the capitalist lives, 
 just as the avocation by which the workman lives 
 is the actual production of commodities. 
 
 Capitalism cannot be said even to begin before 
 a number of individual owners of money employ 
 simultaneously a number of workmen on the same 
 terms, that is to say, before the development of 
 a concert of action towards profit among the em- 
 ' ployers, and a concert of action towards produc¬ 
 tion for the profit of the employers among the 
 Employed. 
 
 “A greater number of laborers working to¬ 
 gether at the same time in one place (or, if you 
 will, in the same field of labor), in order to pro¬ 
 duce the same sort of commodity under the mas¬ 
 tership of one capitalist, constitutes, both his^ 
 
 1 Says Mr. Boffin in Dicken’s Mutual Friend, when 
 he wants to make a show of striking a somewhat 
 hard, but reasonable bargain: “When I buy a sheep, I 
 buy it out and out, and when I buy a secretary I ex¬ 
 pect to buy him out and out,” or words to that effect; 
 and the reasonableness of the conditions are accepted 
 on all hands. 
 
184 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 torically and logically, the starting-point of capi¬ 
 talist production.” 
 
 It differs from the mediaeval system, that of 
 the guilds and their craftsmen, by the greater 
 number of the workmen employed; but this 
 change to a new form of organization made at 
 once considerable difference in the rate and man¬ 
 ner of production; there was less comparative 
 expense of the means of production, such as 
 buildings, tools, warehouses, etc. 1 A consequence 
 of this concentration of workmen under one roof 
 was the development of the function of direction 
 in the master as independent of his qualities as a 
 craftsman, and the forcing on the system of this 
 function as a necessary part of production. The 
 master of the guild-craftsman period held his 
 place because he was a better workman and more 
 experienced than his fellows; he did not differ 
 from them in kind but in degree only; if he fell 
 sick, for instance, his place would be taken by the 
 next best workman without any disturbance in 
 the organization of the workshop; but the master 
 of even the earliest period of capitalism was from 
 the beginning unimportant as a workman (even 
 when he worked, as he often did at first), but all- 
 
 1 The master worker of the guild-system was not 
 really a master at all even after he began to employ 
 journeymen, because their number was limited very 
 closely, and they were all sure to become masters in 
 their turn: the real “employer of labor” was the guild, 
 and the “master” of that period was simply a foreman 
 of the guild; the great change consisted in the breaking 
 down of the position of the guild as employer, and the 
 turning of its foreman into a real owner or capitalist. 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 185 
 
 important as a director of work. “Simple co¬ 
 operation/’ says Marx, “is always the prevailing 
 form, in those branches of production in which 
 capital acts on a large scale, and division of labor 
 and machinery play but a subordinate part.” This 
 sentence leads to the next development of capi¬ 
 talism, that of the division of labor, and this 
 brings us to the system of manufacture, as the 
 world is generally understood; though it has a 
 final development, that of machinery and the fac¬ 
 tory. This period of the division of labor, more 
 or less pure, extends from the middle of the 
 sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries, 
 when it was brought to perfection; but it must 
 be understood that these systems overlapped one 
 another considerably. 
 
 The division-of-labor or manufacturing system 
 starts under two conditions. 
 
 The first is where the employer collects into 
 one workshop workmen of various crafts, the re¬ 
 sults of whose labors are combined into one ar¬ 
 ticle, as, for example, a carriage-maker’s, in 
 which wheelwright, coachbuilder, upholsterer, 
 painter, etc., work each at his own occupation, 
 and their products are combined into the one 
 article, a finished carriage. 
 
 The other is the system in which the employer 
 collects his workmen under one roof, and em¬ 
 ploys the whole of them as one machine in the 
 simultaneous production of one article which has 
 to go through various processes, these processes 
 being apportioned to various parts of the work¬ 
 man-machine. This system affords a distinct 
 
186 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 example of evolution by means of survival of the 
 fittest; sudden increase of production seems to 
 have been called for, and the work accordingly 
 had to be reorganized by being apportioned to 
 different workmen in order to save time. Thus 
 this system is the reverse of that illustrated by 
 the carriage-making, in which a number of crafts 
 had to be combined into the manufacture of one 
 article; whereas in this (pin or needle-making 
 may be taken as an illustration) a number of 
 processes which once formed portions of one 
 craft, now become each of them a separate craft 
 in itself. 
 
 From this follows the complete inter-depend¬ 
 ence of each human being forming a part of the 
 workman-machine, no one of whom can produce 
 anything by himself. The unit of labor is now 
 no longer an individual, but a group. 
 
 But all these processes, however subdivided, 
 and however combined, were still acts of handi¬ 
 craft; the same necessities-which forced the sim¬ 
 ple co-operation of the first capitalistic period 
 into division of labor, now forced the latter sys¬ 
 tem to yet further development; though, indeed, 
 other causes besides merely economic ones were 
 at work, such as the growing aggregation of 
 people in towns and the consequent increasing 
 division of labor in Society itself as to the occu¬ 
 pations of its members. 
 
 This final development was the substitution of 
 the machine and the complete factory-system for 
 the “division-of-labor” and “workshop” systems. 
 Under the new system the group of workmen, 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 187 
 
 every member of which by the performance of a 
 special piece of handicraft turned out some special 
 part of the article made, gave place to a machine 
 which produces the results of all these ma¬ 
 noeuvres combined together; or to an association 
 of machines acting in a group, as the workmen 
 acted. The workman is no longer the principal 
 factor in the work, the tools that he handled are 
 now worked by a mechanism connected by an¬ 
 other mechanism with the power, whatever it 
 may be, that puts the whole in motion. This is 
 the true machine of modern times, as contrasted 
 with the mere tool-machine of the earlier period, 
 which was an aid to the workman and not a sub¬ 
 stitute for him. Furthermore, the workshop 
 gives place to the factory, which is not a mere 
 assemblage of machines under one roof, but 
 rather a great machine itself, of which the ma¬ 
 chines are parts ; as Marx says: “An organized 
 system of machines to which motion is communi¬ 
 cated by the transmitting mechanism from a cen¬ 
 tral automaton is the most developed form of 
 production by machinery. Here we have in place 
 of the isolated machine a mechanical monster, 
 whose body fills whole factories, and whose de¬ 
 mon power, at first veiled under the slow and 
 measured motion of his giant limbs, at last breaks 
 out into the fast and furious whirl of his count¬ 
 less working organs.” 
 
 This is the machine that has produced the great 
 revolution in production of our epoch. The work- 
 
188 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 man once a handicraftsman, having all control 
 over the article he produced, next became a part 
 of a human machine, and finally has become the 
 servant and tender of a machine; and by means 
 of all this the fully developed modern capitalist 
 has been brought into existence. 
 
 We have now come to the point where it is 
 necessary to consider the ciruculation of com¬ 
 modities ; the first means to this circulation being 
 the establishment of a tertium quid, or universal 
 equivalent. And in order to have a really univer¬ 
 sale equivalent it is necessary that use-value should 
 be eliminated from it, since such an equivalent 
 is required to express not the diverse qualities 
 of all the various commodities, but the relative 
 quantity of embodied human labor which they 
 severally contain. 
 
 Money as a mere measure of value is imagi¬ 
 nary and ideal, but the bodily form of it must 
 express quantitatively equivalent abstract value 
 — i. e. labor—and takes the form of the precious 
 metals, finally of gold. 
 
 Gold has come to be the bodily form taken by 
 the universal measure of value, partly because of 
 its natural qualities—portability, durability, etc., 
 but chiefly because the course of history has in¬ 
 vested it with this function; and also because its 
 value, instead of changing from, say, week to 
 week, as is the case with other commodities, 
 changes rather from century to century, so that it 
 may be considered stable relatively to them, just 
 as one speaks of indigo as a permanent dye, which 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 189 
 
 it is relatively to other dyes, although none are 
 absolutely permanent. 1 
 
 Paper money is promises to pay gold, which 
 is directly exchangeable with all other commodi¬ 
 ties. Paper money, therefore, is merely a symbol 
 of the exchange really effected by gold. 
 
 This universal equivalent takes the place of 
 barter, which is the primitive and direct form of 
 exchange, 2 and at which stage the distinction be¬ 
 tween buyer and seller has not arisen. It now 
 gives place to the first form of indirect exchange, 
 in which a third term is interposed between the 
 articles that are to be parted with and acquired. 
 Now for the first time the above distinction takes 
 shape. The seller has a commodity which he 
 
 1 As a deduction from this, we may say that while on 
 the one hand there was no abstract necessity for the 
 measure of value taking the form of gold, though there 
 was a necessity for it to take a form embodying a cer¬ 
 tain definite amount of labor, yet, on the other hand, 
 since it has taken that form, labor notes, or mere prom¬ 
 ises to pay which are of no value in themselves, cannot, 
 as long as exchange lasts, take the place of gold, which 
 is a commodity having a value, in itself, and the par¬ 
 ticular commodity that has assumed that function 
 through historical selection. 
 
 2 There are transitional stages between barter pure 
 and simple and exchange operated by a universal equiv¬ 
 alent, which only partly fulfilled this office: e. g., cattle, 
 in the primitive ancient period, from which the name 
 for money ( pecunia ) is derived; or ordinary woollen 
 cloth, as in the curious and rather elaborate currency 
 of the Scandinavians before coin was struck in Nor¬ 
 way : which currency, by the way, has again, in the form 
 of blankets, been used even in our own times in the 
 Hudson Bay Territory. 
 
190 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 does not propose to consume, and therefore he 
 acquires with it money, with which money he 
 buys in turn another commodity equal in quan¬ 
 tity to that with which he has parted, but differ¬ 
 ent from it in quality. Marx has indicated this 
 transaction by the well-known and useful formula, 
 Commodity, Money, Commodity: C—M—C. 
 
 The habit of hoarding, which is common 
 amongst ancient societies, and also among bar¬ 
 barous people, is a natural concommitant of this 
 stage of exchange, and is the first germ of capital. 
 It is brought about by the arrest of the above 
 process at its first phase thus, C—M—the seller 
 of the commodity does not go on to buy. Under 
 these conditions money becomes a social power; 
 and being a commodity like other commodities, 
 can be acquired by private persons, whom it in¬ 
 vests with social power. Therefore in those 
 states of society which had not outgrown their 
 primitive social ethics, money was considered the 
 embodiment of all evil. 
 
 This stage of exchange marks the pre-commer¬ 
 cial use of money; after a while it tends to de¬ 
 velop into another stage, which carries the ex¬ 
 change a step further. The holder of a com¬ 
 modity which he does not propose to consume 
 exchanges it for money, which he again ex¬ 
 changes for a commodity to be used, not for his 
 personal consumption, but to be exchanged once 
 more for money. He would have no object in 
 doing this if his aim were merely that of the 
 simple exchanger (C. M. C.). namely, to obtain 
 an article of consumption different in kind from 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 191 
 
 that which he has exchanged, since in money 
 there is no inherent difference of quality, and 
 therefore whatever difference there may be must 
 be one of quantity. Accordingly the object of 
 the exchanger in this second stage is amount, 
 not kind. In going through his process of ex¬ 
 change (the formula for which may be stated 
 thus— 
 
 C—M—C—M—C), 
 
 the second quantum of money must be more than 
 the first, or else he will have failed in his object; 
 will have made a bad bargain, as the phrase 
 goes. On the other hand, though this form of 
 exchange differs essentially it nevertheless con¬ 
 nects itself with the earlier form, in which 
 money occurs only as the middle term between 
 commodity and commodity, thus distinguishing 
 it from simple barter, because even in the later 
 form the result of the merchant’s transaction is 
 a commodity with which he intends to begin a 
 fresh transaction— 
 
 C_M—C—M—C. 
 
 This is the form of exchange which was the 
 practice of the developed classical world in its 
 commercial operations. The break up of the Ro¬ 
 man Empire, and the confusion that followed, 
 dislocated this commerce, and largely brought 
 exchange back again to its earlier and simple 
 form of the exchange of a commodity for money 
 with which to buy another commodity to be con¬ 
 sumed, which was for the most part the charac¬ 
 ter of the exchange of the Middle Ages. 
 
 The second form of exchange leads without 
 
 i 
 
192 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 a break into the third or modern form of Capi¬ 
 talistic Exchange, in which the exchanger, be¬ 
 ginning with money, buys a commodity in order 
 to exchange it for money; which money, as in 
 the foregoing stage, must be more in quantity 
 than that which he began, or his transaction will 
 be a failure. This process differs from that of 
 the last-mentioned stage of exchange in that the 
 result of the transaction is always money, and 
 not a true commodity (that is, a use-value), 
 the latter in the long-run appearing only nomi¬ 
 nally in the transaction. 
 
 To make this clearer, we may give concrete 
 examples of the three forms of exchange. 
 
 In the first stage, illustrated by the proceed¬ 
 ings of the craftsman of the time of Homer, 
 which were pretty much those of the mediaeval 
 craftsman also, the village potter sold his pots, 
 and with the money he got for them, which, 
 possible trickery apart, represented just the value 
 or embodied labor of the pots, he bought meal, 
 oil, wine, flesh, etc., for his own livelihood, and 
 consumed them. 
 
 The merchant of the later classical period 
 shipped, say, purple cloth from Sidon to Alex¬ 
 andria, sold his cloth there, and with the money 
 bought gum-arabic (from the Soudan) and 
 frankincense (from Arabia), which he sold at 
 Athens, where again he shipped oil for another 
 market. He always handled the actual goods he 
 professed to trade in, and the wares which he 
 thus exchanged against the universal equivalent, 
 money, were of various kinds. Similar com- 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 193 
 
 merce went on in the Middle Ages, as with the 
 merchants of Amalfii, Venice, etc., side by side 
 with the primitive barter of the feudal manor, 
 and of the market-town with its corporation and 
 guilds. 
 
 The modern man of commerce, on the con¬ 
 trary, necessarily begins his transaction with 
 money. He buys, say, indigo, which he never 
 sees, receives for it more money than he gave for 
 it, and goes steadily in this process, dealing (un¬ 
 like the ancient carrier-merchant) with one class 
 of goods only; and all the goods in which he 
 deals represent to him so much money: they are 
 only present in his transactions nominally. Money 
 is the be-all and end-all of his existence as a com¬ 
 mercial man. 
 
 This is an example of the pure form of capi¬ 
 talistic exchange, wherein money is exchanged 
 for commodities, and these again for money plus 
 an increment; the formula for which, as given 
 by Marx, is M—C—M. 
 
 The next question we have to consider is how 
 the surplus, the increment above-mentioned, ob¬ 
 tained by this process of exchange, is realized, 
 or, in plain language, where it comes from. 
 
 Marx now shows “how the trick is done,” that 
 is, the process by which the capitalist exploits the 
 laborer under the present system of wages and 
 capital. 
 
 We now come to the two instruments which 
 the capitalist uses in his exploitation of labor, 
 and which are named constant and variable capi¬ 
 tal ; constant capital being the raw material and 
 
194 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 instruments of production, and variable capital 
 the labor-power to be employed in producing on 
 and by means of the former. 
 
 The laborer, as we have seen, adds a value 
 to the raw material upon which he works; but 
 by the very act of adding a new value he pre¬ 
 serves the old; in one character he adds new 
 value, in another he merely preserves what al¬ 
 ready existed. He effects this by working in a 
 particular way, e. g., by spinning,' weaving, or 
 forging, that is, he transforms things which are 
 already utilities into new utilities proportionately 
 greater than they were before. 
 
 “It is thus/’ says Marx, “that the cotton and 
 spindle, the yarn and the loom, the iron and 
 the anvil become constituent elements of a new 
 use-value.” That is, in order to acquire this new 
 value, the labor must be directed to a socially 
 useful end, to a general end, that is, to which 
 the general labor of society is directed, and the 
 value added is to be measured by the average 
 amount of labor-power expended; i. e., by the du¬ 
 ration of the average time of labor. 
 
 Marx says: “We have seen that the means of 
 production transfer value to the new product so 
 far only as during the labor-process they lose 
 value in the shape of their old use-value. The 
 maximum loss of value that they can suffer in 
 the process is plainly limited by the amount of the 
 original value with which they came into the 
 process, or in other words by the labor-time nec¬ 
 essary for their production. Therefore, the 
 means of production can never add more value 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 195 
 
 to the product than they themselves possess inde¬ 
 pendently of the process in which they assist. 
 However useful a given kind of raw material, 
 or a machine, or other means of production may 
 be, though it may cost £150, or say 500 days’ 
 labor, yet it cannot under any circumstances add 
 to the value of the product more than £150. Its 
 value is determined not by the labor-process into 
 which it enters as a means of production, but 
 by that out of which it has issued as a product. 
 In the labor-process it only serves as a mere 
 use-value, a thing with useful properties, and 
 could not therefore transfer any value to the 
 product unless it possessed such value previ¬ 
 ously.” The matter is succinctly put as follows: 
 “The means of production on the one hand, 
 labor-power on the other, are merely the different 
 modes of existence which the value of the orig¬ 
 inal capital assumed when from being money it 
 was transformed into the various factors of the 
 labor-process. That part of capital that is repre¬ 
 sented by the means of production, by the raw 
 material, auxiliary material, and the instruments 
 of labor, does not in bhe process of production 
 undergo any quantitative alteration of value. I 
 therefore call it the constant part of capital, or 
 more shortly constant capital ” . 
 
 At first sight it might be thought that the 
 wear and tear of the machinery, and the seem¬ 
 ing disappearance of part of the auxiliary ma¬ 
 terial (as e. g., the mordants used in dyeing 
 cloth or yarn, or the gums, etc., used in textile 
 printing) contradict this statement as to the alter- 
 
196 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 ation of value; but on closer view it will be seen 
 that the above wear and tear and apparent con¬ 
 sumption enter into the new product just as much 
 as the visible raw material does; neither are really 
 consumed, but transformed. 
 
 In the following chapters Marx enters into an 
 elaborate and exhaustive analysis of the rate 
 of surplus-value, i. e., of the rate at which the 
 creation of surplus-value takes place; and he also 
 deals with the important subject of the duration 
 of the working-day. But as this is after all a 
 matter of detail, in spite of its very great in¬ 
 terest and importance we must omit it, as it would 
 carry us beyond the scope of this chapter. 
 
 Marx distinguishes between absolute and rela¬ 
 tive “surplus-value”; the absolute being the prod¬ 
 uct of a day’s labor over and above the necessary 
 subsistence of the workman, whatever the time 
 necessary for the production of a definite amount 
 of product may be. The relative “surplus-value,” 
 on the other hand, is determined by the increased 
 productivity of labor caused by new inventions, 
 machinery, increased skill, either in manipula¬ 
 tion or the organization of labor, by which the 
 time necessary for the production of the laborer’s 
 means of subsistence may be indefinitely short¬ 
 ened. 
 
 It will be seen once again from all this, that 
 whatever instruments may be put into the hands 
 of the laborer to bring about a result from his 
 labor, in spite of all pretenses to the contrary, the 
 one instrument necessary to the capitalist is the 
 laborer himself living under such conditions that 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 197 
 
 he can be used as a mere instrument for the 
 production of profit. The tools, machinery, fac¬ 
 tories, means of exchange, etc., are only inter¬ 
 mediate aids for putting the living machine into 
 operation. 
 
 Marx now goes on to trace the development of 
 the capitalist in the present epoch, indicating the 
 latest phase of the class-struggle; he points out 
 the strife of the workman with the machine the 
 the intensification of labor, due to the con¬ 
 stant improvement of machinery, etc. He then 
 gives what may be called a history and analysis of 
 the Factory Acts, the legislation to which the 
 employing class found themselves compelled, in 
 order to make it possible for the “free” workman 
 to live under his new conditions of competition: 
 in order, in short, to keep the industrial society 
 founded by the machine-revolution from falling 
 to pieces almost as soon as it was established. 
 
 The point of the intensification of labor is so 
 important that it demands a word or two in pass¬ 
 ing; the gist of the matter as put forward by 
 Marx resolves itself into this: As the organiza¬ 
 tion of production progresses towards perfection, 
 the wear and tear of the workman in a given 
 space of labor-time is increased; and this is true 
 of the organization of the “division-of-labor” pe¬ 
 riod, only it is limited by the fact that the man 
 himself is the machine, and no such limitation 
 exists in the period of fully-developed machinery, 
 in which the workman is an adjunct of the 
 machine, which latter dictates to its supplement, 
 the workman, in its constant craving for increas- 
 
198 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 ing productivity, the amount of wear and tear of 
 his body in each hour’s work. This emphasizes 
 as plainly as possible the subjection of the man 
 to the machine. 
 
 Marx also deals with the theory of compensa¬ 
 tion to the workman displaced by machinery; 
 that is, the common view, that by the labor-sav¬ 
 ing of machinery, which at first sight would seem 
 to tend to the lessening of the number of men 
 employed, more capital is set free for employ¬ 
 ment. But, says Marx: “Suppose a capitalist 
 to employ 100 workmen at £30 a-year each in a 
 carpet factory. The variable capital annually 
 laid out amounts therefore to £3,000. Suppose 
 also that he discharges fifty of his workmen, 
 and employs the remaining fifty with machinery 
 that costs him £1,500. To simplify matters we 
 take no account of buildings, coal, etc. Further, 
 suppose that the raw material annually con¬ 
 sumed costs £3,000 both before and after the 
 change. Is any capital set free by this meta¬ 
 morphosis? Before the change the total sum of 
 £6,000 consisted half of constant, half of vari¬ 
 able, capital. The variable capital, instead of 
 being one-half is only one-quarter of the total 
 capital. Instead of being set free, a part of the 
 capital is here locked up in such a way as to 
 cease to be employed in labor-power; variable 
 has been changed into constant capital. Other 
 things remaining unchanged, the capital of 
 £6,000 can in future employ no more than fifty 
 men. With each improvement in machinery, 
 it will employ fewer.” 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 199 
 
 And again: “The laborers when driven out of 
 the workshop by machinery, are thrown upon the 
 labor-market, and there add to the number of 
 workmen at the disposal of the capitalists. In 
 Part VII. of this book it will be seen that this 
 effect of machinery, which, as we have seen, is 
 represented to be a compensation to the working 
 class, is on the contrary a most frightful scourge. 
 For the present, I will only say this: The la¬ 
 borers that are thrown out of work in any 
 branch of industry, can no doubt seek for em¬ 
 ployment in some other branch. If they find it, 
 and thus renew the bond between them and the 
 means of subsistence, this takes place only by 
 the intermediary of a new and additional capital 
 that is seeking investment; not at all by the in¬ 
 termediary of the capitl that formerly employed 
 them, and was afterwards converted into ma¬ 
 chinery.” The remainder of this Part V. of 
 Marx deals with! various questions connected 
 with the Great Industry, and the changes pro¬ 
 duced by it on Society. Part VI. deals with the 
 transformation of the value or price of labor- 
 power into wages; with time wages, piece wages, 
 and the national differences of wages. Part VII. 
 deals with the important subject of the accumu¬ 
 lation of capital; first, with its simple reproduc¬ 
 tion, afterwards with the conversion of surplus- 
 value itself back into capital, and with the tran¬ 
 sition of the laws of property, that characterize 
 the production of commodities, into the laws of 
 capitalistic appropriation. This part also con¬ 
 tains a sarcastic refutation of the now exploded 
 
£00 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 stupidity (scarcely to be called a theory) of “ab¬ 
 stinence” as the source of interest; it also deals 
 with the old wages-fund theory and other fala- 
 cies of bourgeois economy, concluding with a 
 long and elaborate chapter on the general law 
 of capitalistic accumulation in its various aspects. 
 The last Part (XIII.) treats of the so-called 
 primitive accumulation, of which Marx says: 
 “This primitive accumulation plays in political 
 economy about the same part as original sin in 
 theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon 
 sin fell upon the human race. Its origin is sup¬ 
 posed to be explained when it is told as an anec¬ 
 dote of the past. In times long gone by there 
 were two sorts of people, one, the diligent, intel¬ 
 ligent, and above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy 
 rascals, spending their substance and more in 
 riotous living. The legend of theological origi¬ 
 nal sin tells us certainly how man is to be con¬ 
 demned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; 
 but the history of economic original sin reveals 
 to us that there are people to whom this is by no 
 means esential. Never mind! Thus it came to 
 pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, 
 and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell ex¬ 
 cept their own skins. And from this original sin 
 dates the poverty of the great majority, that, 
 despite all its labor, has up to now nothing to 
 sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that in¬ 
 creases constantly although they have long 
 ceased to work. ... In actual history it is 
 notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, 
 murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the 
 
SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM 
 
 201 
 
 tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic 
 reigns from time immemorial. Right and ‘la¬ 
 bor were from all time the sole means of en¬ 
 richment, the present year of course always ex¬ 
 cepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of 
 primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic. ,, 
 
 Marx then proceeds to give an instance of 
 one important form of “Primitive Accumula¬ 
 tion,” the expropriation of the peasants from the 
 land, taking affairs in England as a type of this 
 idyllic proceeding; as also the legislation at the 
 close of the Middle Ages against vagrants, etc., 
 that is, against those who had been expropriated; 
 and the enactments for the forcing- down of 
 wages. He then describes the birth of the capi¬ 
 talist farmer of modern times, and the reaction 
 of the agricultural revolution on the town in¬ 
 dustry; the creation of the home-market for in¬ 
 dustrial capital, etc. A chapter follows on the 
 historical tendency of capitalistic accumulation 
 to work out its own contradiction; it becomes 
 necessary again to quote a passage as it bears 
 reference to the future of Society: “The capital¬ 
 ist mode of appropriation, the result of the capi¬ 
 talist mode of production, produces capitalist pri¬ 
 vate property. This is the first negation of in¬ 
 dividual private property, 1 as founded on the labor 
 
 1 It is important not to misunderstand this phrase as 
 used here. The labor of the Middle Ages, though 
 individual from its mechanical side, was from its moral 
 side quite definitely dominated by the principle of asso¬ 
 ciation ; as we have seen, the “master” of that period 
 was but a delegate of the guild. 
 
202 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 of the proprietor. But capitalistic production be¬ 
 gets with the inexorability of a law of Nature 
 its own negation. It is the negation of 
 negation. This does not re-establish pri¬ 
 vate property for the; producer, but gives him 
 property based on the acquisitions of the capi¬ 
 talistic era; i. e. on co-operation, and the posses¬ 
 sion in common of the land and of the means 
 of production. The transformation of scattered 
 private property, arising from individual labor, 
 into capitalistic private property, is naturally a 
 process incomparably more protracted, violent, 
 and difficult than the transformation of capital¬ 
 istic private property, already practically resting 
 on socialized production, into socialized property. 
 In the former case we had the expropriation of 
 the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the 
 latter we have the expropriation of a few usurp¬ 
 ers by the mass of the people.” 
 
 A chapter on certain middle-class economist 
 notions respecting colonization ends the first 
 volume of Marx’s epoch-making work, a volume 
 expounding the salient principles of the new 
 economy. 1 
 
 1 A second volume was published the year after 
 Marx’s death, and Frederic Engels is now at work pre¬ 
 paring the third and final volume for publication. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 I 
 
 SOCIALISM MILITANT 
 
 XXT E have now come to the point at which we 
 must leave our account of what has 
 taken place in the development of society, and 
 must give our views as to how the inevitable 
 transformation of Civilization into Socialism is 
 most likely to happen; what is going on at pres¬ 
 ent that tends towards this; and what the tac¬ 
 tics of those should be who desire the change 
 and are working for it. 
 
 We are driven to consider these matters from 
 the point of view of our of our own British popu¬ 
 lation, as it is through these that the British so¬ 
 cialist must work directly, although with the as¬ 
 sured hope that in so doing he is furthering the 
 cause of social transformation throughout all 
 modern civilization. 
 
 As above hinted, things have much changed 
 since scientific Socialism has been definitely pro¬ 
 mulgated in this country. 
 
 Ten years ago, from the time at which we are 
 writing, the British working classes knew noth¬ 
 ing of Socialism, and, except for a few who had 
 been directly influenced by the continental move- 
 
 203 
 
204 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 ment, were, on the surface and by habit, hostile 
 to it. A Socialist lecturer in those days almost 
 invariably found himself in opposition, not only 
 to the members of the middle classes who might 
 be present, but also to the working men amongst 
 his audience; who, not being able even to conceive 
 of the ideas which he was putting forward, at the 
 best took refuge in the Radicalism to which they 
 were accustomed. 
 
 In short the working man of our generation, 
 even when an advanced politician, looked on 
 himself as a free citizen like any other man, and 
 had no consciousness of his position as a prole¬ 
 tarian, or that the reason for his existence, as a 
 workman, was that he might produce profit by 
 his labor for his master. His ideal (again as a 
 workman) was good wages and constant em¬ 
 ployment; that is, enough to enable him to live 
 without much trouble in a constant condition of 
 inferiority. His ideal of prosperity as an indi¬ 
 vidual was becoming a master and extracting 
 profits from his old associates, .like the French 
 soldier, who is conventially supposed to carry 
 the Marshal’s baton in his knapsack. This is 
 now so much changed that the mass of the work¬ 
 ing classes is beginning to feel its position of 
 economical slavery; there is no longer amongst 
 it any hostility to Socialism; and those working 
 men who take genuine interest in general poli¬ 
 tics are in favor of Socialist tendencies as far as 
 they understand them; so that nowadays the So¬ 
 cialist lecturer rather finds a difficulty in draw- 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 
 
 205 
 
 ing out opposition to his views, until he begins 
 to deal with details. 
 
 On the other hand, though the working class 
 is awakening to a consciousness of its condition, 
 it is sluggish in political activity. But this is, 
 no doubt, a passing phase with the workmen, 
 easily accounted for by their absorption in the 
 immediate industrial struggle; and on this side 
 also, progress is certainly being made. The old 
 battle between the workmen and the manufac¬ 
 turers is still, necessarily, going on; but is chang¬ 
 ing its character. There is in it less of the mere 
 dispute between two parties to a contract ad¬ 
 mitted as necessary by either, and more of an 
 instinct of essentially opposed interests between 
 employers and employed, and even of revolt; the 
 working men are beginning to assume that they 
 have a right to some share in the control of 
 manufacture; the masters for their part per¬ 
 ceive this new spirit, and have begun a definite 
 attack on the organizations which are instinct 
 with it. 
 
 One occasion has arisen which has appealed 
 strongly to the instincts of the working classes 
 generally, and has united them in a socio-politi¬ 
 cal demand, to-wit, the eight hours’ legal day; 
 whatever may be said as to the effect that an 
 enactment in this sense would have, the demand 
 at any rate expresses the desire of the workmen 
 to manage their own affairs, and to curtail the 
 power of the capitalist class. 
 
 Moreover, it is a demand which can only be 
 sustained with the collaboration of the workmen 
 
206 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 / 
 
 of Europe at least, if not of all civilization, so 
 that it has the further advantage of bringing the 
 British proletarian into friendly contact with his 
 continental brother for the furtherance of a 
 tangible and immediate common gain. 
 
 A necessary accompaniment of the wages and 
 capital system, with its competition for employ¬ 
 ment amongst the propertiless proletariat, is the 
 floating mass of workmen rejected for the time 
 by the labor-market; this mass of unemployed 
 has a continuous tendency to increase as ma¬ 
 chinery and the organization of the factory grow 
 toward perfection, the completement to this phe¬ 
 nomenon being the cycles of inflation and depres¬ 
 sion, which are also a necessary consequence of 
 the great machine industry, and the world- 
 market which it feeds. At every fresh depres¬ 
 sion this matter of the unemployed becomes 
 more pressing and harder to be dealt with, and 
 although the regular recurrence of these crises 
 was denied for a long time, it has now been gen¬ 
 erally admitted. The periods of depression, 
 which were at first short and sharp, and sepa¬ 
 rated by long times of prosperity, have grown 
 to be of longer duration if comparatively not so 
 severe. As a consequence, the lack of employ¬ 
 ment over large sections of the population is be¬ 
 coming chronic. It is thought by some of those 
 who further the legal eight hours’ day that this 
 measure would do much towards absorbing the 
 mass of the unemployed; but though its imme¬ 
 diate effect might be felt in this direction, yet 
 when the labor-market steadied after the change, 
 
 X 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 
 
 207 
 
 it would be found that the evil was little lessened. 
 The chronic lack of employment will have to be 
 dealt with by more direct methods, which will 
 more definitely attack the Freedom of Contract 
 (so-called), of which more hereafter. 
 
 It has been said that the condition of the work¬ 
 ing classes has much improved within this cen¬ 
 tury; this is true in an absolute sense of the 
 skilled artisans; though the improvement has not 
 touched the fringe of labor at all. Even as to 
 skilled workmen, relatively to the enormous in- 
 crease of wealth in the country, they are in a 
 worse and not in a better condition; this com¬ 
 bined with the fact that their political power has 
 grown, makes it certain that they will claim an 
 ever-increasing share in the wealth that they pro¬ 
 duce ; and such betterment they can obviously 
 only obtain at the expense of the capitalist class. 
 The improvement therefore on these terms of 
 a part of the workmen by no means indicates 
 stability in the present fabric of society. For 
 the prosperity of the middle classes gives a 
 standard of comfort to the workmen; and on the 
 other hand it is growing clearer to them that the 
 obstacles to attaining a like welfare are arti¬ 
 ficially economical, and not essential, and can be 
 done away with by means of combined action 
 in industrial and political directions. 
 
 Meantime, though the middle class has in¬ 
 creased enormously in numbers, and become very 
 much richer as a class, yet it has its own unpros- 
 perous fringe, which has grown beyond measure, 
 mostly because of the great diffusion and conse- 
 
208 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 quent loss in market-value of education. This 
 intellectual proletariat, as it has been called, is 
 one of the most disruptive elements of modern 
 society, as it is largely in sympathy with the 
 wage-earners, and is quick to catch up with new 
 ideas, while the position of most of its members 
 is worse than that of an average skilled work¬ 
 man. It must be said by the way that in Ger¬ 
 many this element of the poor but educated sec¬ 
 tion of the middle classes is even more important 
 than here. 
 
 We have then a large body of proletarian pro¬ 
 ducers, with important allies among the middle 
 classes themselves, who are in an inferior econo¬ 
 mic position to those whose sole business is mak¬ 
 ing a profit a*# of them, who do not produce at 
 all. But this better-off working class is above 
 the condition of abject poverty, and its intelli¬ 
 gence and education is as a body little, if at all, 
 inferior to that of the class that keeps it in sub¬ 
 jection. Added to that, it has, as above said, now 
 obtained considerable political power, which is 
 shared to a great extent by the unskilled work¬ 
 men, with whom they now make common cause. 
 
 It seems certain therefore that the workmen, 
 with their eyes fixed on the necessity for their 
 bettering themselves as a class, and the growing 
 consciousness that this can only be done by limit¬ 
 ing the power and consequent riches of their 
 masters, will press forward their case politically; 
 that is, by forcing legislation in their favor from 
 the present possessing classes; which will in the 
 long run come to this, that they will deprive 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 
 
 209 
 
 those classes of all the privilege that makes them 
 a master-class. 
 
 It seems to us that it is along this line, which 
 the workmen are now beginning to take up of 
 themselves, that progress towards revolution 
 will be made. For it must be remembered once 
 more that the great mass of those who are push¬ 
 ing forward by this road, are only very partially 
 conscious of whither it is tending; seeing, not 
 the birth of a new society founded on general 
 equality of condition, but rather a higher and less 
 precarious standard of livelihood and something 
 more of social recognition from their superiors; 
 in short, it is the ideal, not of Socialists, but of 
 men moved by the growing instinct toivarcls So¬ 
 cialism. It must here be noted as to this com- 
 mon-place and unideal side of the movement, 
 that, throughout modern history, there has been 
 in all democratic fermentations a discrepancy, 
 indeed often an instinctive antipathy, between the 
 theoretic movement, as conceived of by think¬ 
 ers, and the actual popular or working-class 
 struggle. The latter intent on immediate advan¬ 
 tages, and unconscious of any ideal; the former 
 full of the ideal which they have grasped in¬ 
 tuitively from the first, but finding the necessary 
 steps towards it so repulsive to them, that they 
 are incapable of) taking action. Sir Thomas 
 More, for example, who imagined a society free 
 from the evils of privileged commercialism, 
 which was first raising its head in his time, had 
 no svmpthy with the western rebels in England 
 or with the Peasant War in Germany. The 
 
210 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 French Utopists condemned popular revolution¬ 
 ary action. Robert Owen, though the most hu¬ 
 mane of men, looked upon Chartism as an in¬ 
 terruption to his co-operative schemes, and de¬ 
 precated it. 
 
 The progress of the revolutionary idea is 
 shown by the fact that, in our own times, there 
 is nothing but a trace of this jarring left. The 
 workmen are not unwilling to accept the theor¬ 
 ists as leaders; while the theorists fully and 
 frankly recognize that it is through the instinc¬ 
 tive working-class movement towards the bet¬ 
 tering of life, by whatever political-economical 
 methods, that their ideal of a new society must 
 be sought. This period of practical unity of aim 
 between the theorist and the agitator for imme¬ 
 diate gains, must be considered to date from 
 the Communist Manifesto published by Marx 
 and Engels in 1847. 
 
 In short, while it is essential that the ideal of 
 the new society should be always kept before the 
 eyes of the mass of the working-classes, lest the 
 continuity of the demands of the people should 
 be broken, or lest they should be misdirected; so 
 it is no less essential that the theorists should 
 steadily take part in all action that tends towards 
 Socialism, lest their wholesome and truthful 
 theories should be left adrift on the barren shore 
 of Utopianism. 
 
 The demands for legislation at present formu¬ 
 lated by the working-classes generally, and 
 adopted, so far as they go, by Socialists, are 
 manifestly incomplete, and if granted would still 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 
 
 211 
 
 leave us with the evils of the capitalist system 
 little touched. For example, the legal eight 
 hours’ day, if carried, would, as above pointed 
 out, result in a quite temporary absorption of the 
 unemployed, and also it would not of itself per¬ 
 manently increase the wages of the employed. 
 In order that the condition of the unskilled work¬ 
 men should be raised to something like a human 
 level, it would be necessary in our opinion that, 
 first of all, a minimum legal wage should be 
 enacted; and this also would be illusive if it were 
 not supplemented by the enactment of a legal 
 maximum for all the necessaries of life; since, 
 otherwise, prices would rise in some sort of pro¬ 
 portion to the higher wages enforced by the new 
 legislation. But it must not be supposed that any 
 such measures would be of permanent value ex¬ 
 cept as preludes to the assumption by the com¬ 
 munity of all the means of production and ex¬ 
 change, to wit, the land, the mines, the railways, 
 the factories, etc., and the credit establishments 
 of the country. It is a matter of course that we 
 do not expect to see this done by catastrophe— 
 that some Monday morning the sun will rise on 
 a commuized state which was capitalistic on Sat¬ 
 urday night. 1 
 
 Various schemes for accomplishing this trans¬ 
 fer gradually have been suggested. These must 
 
 1 On the ridiculous assumption that this is intended 
 rests many a “crushing” indictment of Socialism, e. g., 
 it constitutes the marrow of Herr Eugene Richter’s 
 Socialdemocratische Zukunfts-bilder [London, 1893] 
 {Pictures of the Socialistic Future.) 
 
212 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 be tested by experience; suffice it here to say that 
 the pith of them is to work by municipalities and 
 trade organizations for the decentralization of 
 administration, and the acquirement of control 
 over the industries of the country. It is an en¬ 
 couraging sign of the times that even now, both 
 in Paris and London, there seems to be a ten¬ 
 dency for the municipal bodies to supplement, 
 and even to supersede the functions of the na¬ 
 tional legislatures. The Bill prepared by the 
 present Government (clearly with the intention 
 of pleasing the country electors) for the forma¬ 
 tion of District and Parish Councils, though 
 their powers will be but small, is nevertheless 
 an important step, if only as providing a demo¬ 
 cratic machinery, which can be hereafter used 
 for socialistic purposes. 
 
 It should here be stated that there are current 
 amongst Socialists two views on the method of 
 dealing with the modern bureaucratic state, not 
 involving any ultimate opposition to each other, 
 but the result of looking on the matter from dif¬ 
 ferent points of view. To some the national- 
 political systems seem so difficult of attack, and 
 to serve so clearly the end of keeping some kind 
 of society together during the transition period, 
 that they look forward to the new society devel¬ 
 oping itself under the political shell of the old 
 bureaucratic states, which could to a certain ex¬ 
 tent be used by the revolutionists, rather than to 
 any disruption of them prior to the realization 
 of the new social system. 
 
 Others again agree with us in the above stated 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 
 
 213 
 
 views, that while the national systems cannot at 
 present be directly attacked with success as to 
 their more fundamental elements, yet that these 
 can, and should be, starved out by the continu¬ 
 ous action of two principles, one federal and in¬ 
 ternational, the other local. That is to say, there 
 should take place a gradual and increasing dele¬ 
 gation of the present powers of the central gov¬ 
 ernment to municipal and local bodies, until the 
 political nation should be sapped, and give place 
 to the federation of local and industrial organi¬ 
 zations. We consider that this is essential in 
 view of the fact that these latter would have 
 much greater capacity for dealing with the de¬ 
 tails of the change. And indeed much of their 
 work could go on during the period in which 
 the old political nations were weakening into dis¬ 
 solution, or, as may be better said, were becom¬ 
 ing rudimentary. For example, in the steps to¬ 
 wards communization of industries which would 
 result from the law of minimum and maximum, 
 the regulations would necessarily have to be in 
 the hands of these local bodies (County and Dis^ 
 trict Councils, etc.) It is becoming clear to 
 every one that it is absurd for the central legisla¬ 
 tion to have to do with the details of life in places 
 of which it knows little or nothing. Instances 
 of such cases will keep on multiplying, until it 
 will be found that the centre has nothing to do 
 herein, and the interest in it will be then trans¬ 
 ferred to the localities. A similar line of argu¬ 
 ment applies to the trades. Even now there is 
 at least a foreshadowing of practical unanimity 
 
214 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 of the miners, masons, cotton operatives, and 
 others of this country, agreeing first of all 
 amongst themselves, and then with the same 
 trades in France, Germany, etc. This is, there is 
 little doubt, the beginning of the Industrial Fed¬ 
 eration, to which we shall revert in the next 
 chapter. 
 
 But the central state being supplanted by lo¬ 
 cal bodies in local administration and by the in¬ 
 dustrial bodies independent of locality, there 
 would remain the third function which it exer¬ 
 cises at present, to-wit, the regulation of inter¬ 
 national affairs; and it is clear that in modern 
 times the question of peace and war is almost 
 altogether wielded by capitalistic exigencies, so 
 that this function also would fail the political na¬ 
 tion when capitalism fell. There would be noth¬ 
 ing left for it to do; it would simply die out. In¬ 
 deed we may be sure that the growing under¬ 
 standing on industrial questions is already tend¬ 
 ing, by destroying national jealousies, to the 
 making an end of the destructive part of the 
 functions of central governments. Hence, even 
 before the political nation falls into its last stages 
 of decay, we may hope to see a central arbitrat¬ 
 ing body depriving it of the business which in 
 the past has seemed especially essential to it. 
 
 This is already gone so far that an important 
 proposal is on foot as a plank in the socialist 
 programme: namely, the suggestion of the for¬ 
 mation of an international board of arbitration, 
 immediately for the purpose of avoiding war by 
 the adjudication of disputes. This might easily 
 
SOCIALISM MILITANT 
 
 215 
 
 he made to develop into an international Parlia¬ 
 ment. The substitution of arbitration for war 
 would not indeed of itself bring Socialism about, 
 but, by getting rid of an obvious and acknowl¬ 
 edged brutality, it would bring into relief the 
 veiled economic tyranny oppressing us, and thus 
 advance Socialism. 
 
 Such to our mind is the only means, joined to 
 the gradual shifting of the opinions and aspira¬ 
 tions of the masses, for bringing about the be¬ 
 ginning of the Socialistic system. Armed revolt 
 or civil war may be an incident of the struggle, 
 and in some form or another probably will be 
 especially in the latter phases of the revolution; 
 'but in no case could it supplant the afore-men¬ 
 tioned change in popular feeling, and it must, 
 at all events, follow rather than precede it. 
 
 It is clear that the first real victory of the So¬ 
 cial Revolution will be the establishment not in¬ 
 deed of a complete system of communism in a 
 day, which is absurd, but of a revolutionary 
 administration whose definite and conscious aim 
 will be to prepare and further, in all available 
 ways, human life for such a system—in other 
 words, of an administration whose every act will 
 be of set purpose with a view to Socialism. 
 
 We can therefore see clearly before us a strug¬ 
 gle which will end in realizing a society wherein 
 the means of production are communized, and a 
 relative equality of condition as compared with 
 modern capitalistic society will be attained. This 
 and nothing less than this will be the beginning 
 of Socialism in the true sense of the word; but 
 
216 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 it cannot stop at this point, but must have an im¬ 
 mediate further development, and one which we 
 can conceive of as being directly deducible from 
 it. This must form the subject of our next and 
 concluding chapter. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 JT is possible to succeed in a manner in por¬ 
 traying to ourselves the life of past times: 
 that is, our imaginations will show us a picture 
 of them which may include such accurate infor¬ 
 mation as we may have of them. But though 
 this may be a vivid delineation, and though the 
 information may be just, yet it will not be a 
 picture of what really took place; it will be made 
 up of the present which we experience, and the 
 past which our imagination, drawing from our 
 experience, conceives of—in short, it will be our 
 picture of the past. If this be the case with the 
 past, of which we have some concrete data, still 
 more strongly may it be said of the future, of 
 which we have none, nothing but mere abstract 
 deductions from historic evolution, the logical 
 sequence of which may be interfered with at any 
 point by elements whose force we have not 
 duly appreciated; and these are abstractions also 
 which are but the skeleton of the full life which 
 will go on in those times to come. 
 
 Therefore, though we have no doubt of the 
 transformation of modern civilization into So¬ 
 cialism, yet we cannot foretell definitely what 
 
 * 317 
 
218 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 A 
 
 form the social life of the future will take, any¬ 
 more than a man living at the beginning of the 
 commercial period, say Sir Thomas More or 
 Lord Bacon, could foresee the state of society 
 at the end of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Admitting that we are unable to realize posi¬ 
 tively the life of the future, in which the prin¬ 
 ciple of real society will be universally accepted 
 and applied in practice as an everyday matter, 
 yet the negative side of the question we can all 
 see, and most of us cannot help trying to fill up 
 the void made by the necessary termination of 
 the merely militant period of Socialism. The 
 present society will be gone, with all its para¬ 
 phernalia of checks and safeguards; that we 
 know for certain. No less surely we know what 
 the foundation of the new society will be. What 
 will the new society build on that foundation of 
 freedom and co-operation? That is the prob¬ 
 lem on which we can do no more than speculate. 
 
 It must be understood therefore that in giving 
 this outline of the life of the future, we are not 
 dogmatizing, but only expressing our opinion of 
 what will probably happen, which is of course 
 colored by our personal wishes and hopes. We 
 ask our readers, therefore, not to suppose that 
 we have here any intention of making a state¬ 
 ment of facts, or prophesying in detail the exact 
 form which things will take; though in the main, 
 what we here write will be accepted by the ma¬ 
 jority of Socialists. 
 
 As to the political side of the new society, 
 civilization undertakes the government of per- 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 219 
 
 sons by direct coercion. Socialism would deal 
 primarily with the administration of things . and 
 only secondarily and indirectly would have to 
 do with personal habit and conduct. Civil law, 
 therefore, which is an institution essentially 
 based on private property, would cease to exist, 
 and criminal law, which would tend to become 
 obsolete, would, while it existed, concern itself 
 solely with the protection of the person. It is 
 clear, therefore, that there is no foundation for 
 the outcry sometimes raised against Socialism 
 for proposing to interfere with the liberty of the 
 individual, which would be, in fact, only limited 
 by the natural and inevitable restrictions of in¬ 
 dividual will incident to all societies whatever. 
 
 As to the machinery by means of which this 
 administration of things would be carried out, 
 we ask our readers to try to conceive of some 
 such conditions as these. 
 
 As we hinted in our last chapter, during the 
 transitional period the federal principle would 
 assert itself; and this, we believe, would develop 
 at last into a complete automatic system. 
 
 As indicated above, this principle would work 
 in a twofold way. First, locally, as determined 
 by geographical and topographical position, race, 
 and language. Second, industrially, as deter¬ 
 mined by the occupations of people. Topo¬ 
 graphically, we conceive of the township as the 
 lowest unit; industrially, of the trade or occupa¬ 
 tion organized somewhat on the lines of a craft- 
 guild. In many instances the local branch of the 
 guild would be within the limits of the township. 
 
220 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 On the other hand, the highest unit would be 
 the great council of the socialized world, and 
 between these would be federations of localities 
 arranged for convenience of administration. The 
 great federal organizing power, whatever form 
 it took, would have the function of the admin¬ 
 istration of production in its wider sense. It 
 would have to see to, for instance, the collection 
 and distribution of all information as to the wants 
 of populations and the possibilities of supplying 
 them, leaving all details to the subordinate 
 bodies, local and industrial. But also it would 
 be its necessary duty to safeguard the then recog¬ 
 nized principles of society; that is, to guard 
 against any country, or place, or occupation re¬ 
 verting to methods or practices which would be 
 destructive or harmful to the socialistic order, 
 such as any form of the exploitation of labor, if 
 that were possible, or the establishment of any 
 vindictive criminal law. Though in the lower 
 units of this great Federation direct expression 
 of opinion would suffice for carrying on the ad¬ 
 ministration, we cannot see any other means 
 than delegation for doing the work of the higher 
 circles. This means that the development of so¬ 
 ciety beyond what we may call the administra¬ 
 tive period cannot be foreseen as yet. 
 
 We now deal with the religious and ethical 
 basis of which the life of communal society may 
 be called an expression; although from another 
 aspect the religion is an expression of that life—■ 
 the two thus forming a harmonious whole. 
 
 The word religion is still in most minds con- 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 221 
 
 nected with supernatural beliefs, and conse¬ 
 quently its use has been thought unjustifiable 
 where this element is absent. But, as we shall 
 proceed to show, this element is rather accessory 
 to it than essential. 
 
 At first religion had for its object the con¬ 
 tinuance and glory of the kinship-society, 
 whether as clan, tribe, or people, ancestor-wor¬ 
 ship forming the leading feature in its early 
 phases. That religion should then have been 
 connected with what we now call superstition 
 ~was inevitable, since no distinction was drawn 
 between human and other forms of existence in 
 animal life or in inanimate objects, all being alike 
 considered conscious and intelligent. 
 
 Consequently, with the development of ma¬ 
 terial civilization from the domination of things 
 by persons to that of persons by things, and the 
 falling asunder of society into two classes, a pos¬ 
 sessing and dominating class, and a non-possess¬ 
 ing and dominated one, there arose a condition 
 of life which gave leisure for observation 
 and reflection to the former, that is, the privi- 
 ledged class. Out of this reflection arose, the 
 distinction of man as a conscious being apart 
 from the rest of nature. From this again was 
 developed a dual conception of things: on the 
 one hand was man, familiar and known; on the 
 other nature, mysterious and relatively unknown. 
 In nature itself there grew up a further distinc¬ 
 tion between its visible objects, now regarded as 
 unconscious things, and a supposed motive 
 power or “providence” acting- on them from be- 
 
222 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 hind. This was conceived of as man-like in 
 character, but above mankind in knowledge and 
 power, and no longer indwelling in natural ob¬ 
 jects, but without them, moving and controlling 
 them. 
 
 # 
 
 Another set of dual conceptions arose along 
 with this: firstly, the distinction between the in¬ 
 dividual and society, and secondly, within the 
 individual, the distinction between the soul and 
 the body. Religion now became definitely su¬ 
 pernatural, and at last superstitious, in the true 
 sense of the word (superstates, surviving), as 
 far as the cultured class was concerned, since 
 it had gradually lost its old habit of belief in it. 
 
 At this stage arose a conflict not only of be¬ 
 lief but also of ethical conceptions the cere¬ 
 monies and customs based on the earlier ideas 
 of a nature composed of beings who were all 
 conscious, became meaningless and in many 
 cases repulsive to the advanced minds of the 
 epoch; hence was born a system of esoteric ex¬ 
 planation, often embodied in certain secret cere¬ 
 monials termed Mysteries. These Mysteries 
 were a cultus embodying a practice of the an¬ 
 cient rude ceremonies, treated as revelations to 
 certain privileged persons of this hidden mean¬ 
 ing, which could not be understood by the 
 vulgar. That is, the people began to assume that 
 the ancient rude and sometimes coarse cere¬ 
 monies (belief in which directly as explanations 
 of actual events now appeared to them incredi¬ 
 ble) wrapped up mystical meanings in an alle¬ 
 gorical manner; e. g . a simple sun-mvth would 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 223 
 
 be turned into an allegory of the soul and the 
 divinity—their relative dealings with a present 
 and future life. An importance began to be 
 attached to the idea of such future life for the 
 individual soul, which had nothing in common 
 with the old existence of a scarcely broken con¬ 
 tinuity of life, founded not on any positive doc¬ 
 trine, but on the impossibility of an existing be¬ 
 ing conceiving of its non-existence. This idea 
 is naively expressed in the burial ceremonies of 
 all early races, in which food, horses, arms, etc., 
 are interred with the dead man as a provision for 
 his journey to the unknown country. Similar 
 notions, and the doctrines and ceremonies em¬ 
 bodying them, grow in number and bulk as the 
 stream of history broadens down, till they 
 finally issue in the universal or ethical religions 
 (as opposed to the tribal or nature-religions). 
 Of these religions Buddhism and Christianity 
 are the great historical examples, and in them 
 the original ceremonies and their meanings have 
 become fused with each other, and with the new 
 ethics, which they are supposed to express more 
 or less symbolically. An illustration of what has 
 here been said may be found in the fusion of 
 the ancient notions of sacrifice in the Christian 
 dogma of the atonement . 1 • . 
 
 We have said that with the rise of civilization 
 tribal society became divided into classes, owing 
 to the growth of individual, as opposed to cor- 
 
 1 Cf. the article on “Sacrifice,” by Professor Robert¬ 
 son Smith, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition. 
 
224 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 poratc ownership of property. The old rela¬ 
 tions of persons to society were thus destroyed, 
 and with them much of the meaning of the old 
 ethical ideas. In the tribal state the responsi¬ 
 bility of the individual to the limited community 
 of which he formed a part was strongly felt, 
 while he recognized no duty outside this com¬ 
 munity. In the new conception of morality that 
 now arose he had, it is true, duties to all men as 
 a man, irrespective of his social group, but they 
 were vague, and could be evaded or explained 
 away with little disturbance of the conscience; 
 because the central point round which morality 
 revolved was a spiritual deity, who was the 
 source and goal of all moral aspiration, and di¬ 
 rectly revealed himself to the individual con¬ 
 science. These two are the two ethical poles, 
 first, the tribal ethics, the responsibility to a 
 community however limited, and, secondly, the 
 universal or introspective ethics, or responsi¬ 
 bility to a divinity, for whom humanity was but 
 a means of realizing himself. In these ethics 
 the duties of man to man were of secondary 
 importance. But though the tendency was in 
 this direction from the beginnings of civiliza¬ 
 tion, it took historically many centuries to realize 
 itself, and only reached its final development in 
 Christianity. 
 
 As regards the future form of the moral con¬ 
 sciousness, we may safely predict that it will be 
 in a sense a return on a higher level to the ethics 
 of the older world, with the difference that the 
 limitation of scope to the kinship group in its 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 225 
 
 narrower sense, which was one of the causes of 
 the dissolution of ancient society, will disappear, 
 and the identification of individual with social 
 interests will be so complete that any divorce 
 between the two will be inconceivable to the 
 average man. 
 
 It will be noticed that we have above been 
 speaking of religion and morality as distinct 
 from one another. But the religion of Socialism 
 will be but the ordinary ethics carried into a 
 higher atmosphere, and will only differ from 
 them in degree of conscious responsibility to 
 one’s fellows. Socialistic Ethics would be the 
 guide of our daily habit of life; socialistic reli¬ 
 gion would be that higher form of conscience 
 that would impel us to actions on behalf of a 
 future of the race, such as no man could com¬ 
 mand in his ordinary moods. 
 
 As to the particulars of life under the Social¬ 
 istic order, we may, to begin with, say concern¬ 
 ing marriage and the family that it would be 
 affected by the great change, firstly in economics, 
 and secondly in ethics. The present marriage 
 system is based on the general supposition of 
 economic dependence of the woman on the man, 
 and the consequent necessity for his making pro¬ 
 vision for her, which she can legally enforce. 
 This basis would disappear with the advent of 
 social economic freedom, and no binding con¬ 
 tract would be necessary between the parties as 
 regards livelihood; while property in children 
 would cease to exist, and every infant that came 
 into the world would be born into full citizen- 
 
226 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 ship, and would enjoy all its advantages, what¬ 
 ever the conduct of its parents might be. Thus 
 a new development of the family would take 
 place, on the basis, not of a predetermined life¬ 
 long business arrangement, to be formally and 
 nominally held to, irrespective of circumstances, 
 but on mutual inclination and affection, an asso¬ 
 ciation terminable at the will of either party. It 
 is easy to see how great the gain would be to 
 morality and sentiment in this change. At pres¬ 
 ent, in this country at least, a legal and quasi 
 moral offence has to be committed before the ob¬ 
 viously unworkable contract can be set aside. On 
 the Continent, it is true, even at the present day 
 the marriage can be dissolved by mutual consent; 
 but either party can, if so inclined, force the 
 other into subjection, and prevent the exercise 
 of his or her freedom. It is perhaps necessary 
 to state that this change would not be made 
 merely formally and mechanically. There would 
 be no vestige of reprobation weighing on the 
 dissolution of one tie and the forming of an¬ 
 other. For the abhorrence of the oppression of 
 the man by the woman or the woman by the man 
 (both of which continually happen to-day under 
 the aegis of our would-be moral institutions) will 
 certainly be an essential outcome of the ethics 
 of the New Society. We may here note, as an 
 example of the hypocrisy of the modern marriage 
 system, that in the highest circles of our society 
 morganatic marriages incur no blame at all. 
 
 The next point we have to call attention to is 
 the occupations of mankind under Commuism. 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 227 
 
 In the present state of things, which is dominated 
 by capitalism and wage-earning, the repulsive¬ 
 ness of all labor is assumed, the sole motive 
 power being economic coercion from one end of 
 the scale to the other. Now it is true that the 
 original root of incitement to labor is necessity; 
 but throughout the sentient world this is accom¬ 
 panied by pleasure in the successful exercise of 
 energy. Indeed, as beings rise in the scale of 
 development, the proportion of pleasure due to 
 the latter as compared with the pain produced 
 by coercion increases, always presupposing the 
 absence of artificial and privileged coercion. For 
 example, the horse in his natural state delights 
 in running, and the dog in hunting, while in the 
 elementary conditions of savage human life, cer¬ 
 tain ceremonies, and adornments of weapons and 
 the like, point to a sense of pleasure and dignity 
 even in the process of the acquisition of food. 
 When we emerge from vague primitive into 
 early historic barbarism, we find that this ex¬ 
 pression of some degree of pleasure in labor re¬ 
 ceives fresh impetus, and is everywhere present 
 in needful occupations. It was from this turning 
 of a necessary work into amusement that definite 
 art was finally born. 
 
 As Barbarism began to give place to early 
 Civilization, this solace of labor fell asunder into 
 duality like everything else, and art became inci¬ 
 dental and accessory on the one side and inde¬ 
 pendent and primary on the other. We shall 
 take the liberty here of coining words, and call¬ 
 ing the first adjective, and the second substan - 
 
228 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 five art: meaning by adjective art that which 
 grew up unconsciously as an amusement blended 
 with the production of ordinary wares more or 
 less permanent, from a house to a garment-pin; 
 and by substantive, a piece of craftsmanship 
 whose raison d’etre was to be a work of art, and 
 which conveyed a definite meaning or story of 
 some kind. 
 
 In the civilization of Greece, which was so 
 vigorous in throwing off barbarism, substantive 
 art progressed very speedily, more or less to the 
 prejudice of adjective art. As Roman depotism 
 dragged the ancient world into staleness the tri¬ 
 umphant substantive art withered into lifeless 
 academicism, till it was met by the break-up of 
 classical society. Under the new access of bar¬ 
 barism, art, acted on and reacting by, the re¬ 
 mains of the classical life, changed completely, 
 Substantive art almost disappeared and gave 
 place to a fresh development of adjective art, so 
 rich and copious as to throw into the shade en¬ 
 tirely the adjective art of the past, and to fill 
 up the void caused by the waning of substantive 
 art. Architecture, complete and elastic to adapt 
 itself to our necessities, was the birth of this 
 period; the blossoming time of which is dated by 
 the name of the Emperor Justinian ( c . 520 a. d.) 
 This great adjective art developed into perfec¬ 
 tion in the early Middle Ages, its zenith being 
 reached at the middle of the thirteenth century. 
 But its progress was marked by the birth and 
 gradual growth of a new substantive art; which, 
 as the architecture of the Middle Ages began 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 229 
 
 to decline, became, if not more expressive, yet 
 at least more complex and more completely sub¬ 
 stantive till the Middle Ages were on the verge 
 of dissolution. At last came the great change 
 in society marked by the Renaissance enthusiasm 
 and the Reformation; and as the excitement of 
 that period began to pass away, we find adjective 
 art almost gone, and substantive unconscious of 
 any purpose but the display of intellect and dex¬ 
 terity of hand, the old long enduring duality 
 dying out into mere nullity. 
 
 The upshot of this, so far as it concerns the 
 solace of - necessary occupation, is, that while 
 substantive art went on with many vicissitudes, 
 amusing the upper classes, commercialism killed 
 all art for the workman, depriving him neces¬ 
 sarily of the power of appreciating its higher, 
 and the opportunity of producing its subsidiary 
 form. In fact popular art and popular religion 
 were alike unsuitable to the working of the new 
 system of society, and were swept away by it. 
 
 It is no wonder then that almost all modern 
 economists (who seldom study history, and never 
 art), judging from what is going on before their 
 eyes, assume that labor generally must be re¬ 
 pulsive, and that hence coercion must be always 
 employed on the necessarily lazy majority. 
 Though it must be said, to the credit of the 
 Utopist socialists and of Fourier especially, that 
 they perceived instinctively how futile was any 
 hope of the improvement of the race under such 
 circumstances. 
 
 We have seen that the divorce of the work- 
 
230 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 man from pleasure in his labor has only taken 
 place in modern times, for we assert that, how¬ 
 ever it may be with artless labor, art of any 
 kind can never be produced without pleasure. 
 In this case then, as in others, we believe that 
 the New Society will revert to the old method, 
 though on a higher plane. With a very few 
 exceptions Fourier was right in asserting that all 
 labor could be made pleasurable under certain 
 conditions. These conditions are, briefly: free¬ 
 dom from anxiety as to livelihood; shortness of 
 hours in proportion to the stress of the work; 
 variety of occupation if the work is of its nature 
 monotonous; due use of machinery, i. e., the 
 use of it in labor which is essentially oppressive 
 if done by the hand; opportunity for every one 
 to choose the occupation suitable to his capacity 
 and idiosyncrasy; and lastly, the solacing of 
 labor by the introduction of ornament, the mak¬ 
 ing of which is enjoyable to the laborer. As 
 to this matter of occupation we may here say a 
 word on machinery, which, as is now supposed 
 (not without reason), will one day do away with 
 all handiwork except, as is thought, with the 
 highest arts. 
 
 We should say that machinery will be used 
 in a way almost the reverse of the present one. 
 Whereas we now abstain from using it in the 
 roughest and most repulsive work, because it does 
 not pay, in a socialist community its use will be 
 relegated almost entirely to such work, because 
 in a society of equality everything will be thought 
 to pay which dispenses the citizen from drudgery. 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 231 
 
 For the rest it must be admitted that the tendency 
 of modern industrialism is towards the entire 
 extinction of handiwork by machinery; but there 
 is no doubt that in the long run this will work 
 out its own contradiction. Machinery having 
 been perfected, mankind will turn its attention to 
 something else. We shall then begin to free 
 ourselves from the terrible tyranny of machinery, 
 and the results of the great commercial epoch 
 which it has perfected; we fully admit that 
 these results seem destined to overlap from the 
 capitalistic into the socialistic period. 
 
 We have dealt first with the adjective arts be¬ 
 cause the practice of them is directly affected 
 by the change in economics which is at the basis 
 of the transformation of Civilization into Social¬ 
 ism ; let us now look at the substantive arts, be¬ 
 ginning however, with architecture, which is 
 the link between the two categories, embracing as 
 it does, when complete, all the arts which appeal 
 to the eye. 
 
 Architecture, which is above all an art of 
 association, we believe must necessarily be the art 
 of a society of co-operation, in which there will 
 certainly be a tendency towards the absorption 
 of small buildings into big; and it must be re¬ 
 membered that of all the arts it gives most scope 
 to the solace of labor by due ornament. Sculp¬ 
 ture, as in past times, will be considered almost 
 entirely a part of fine building, the highest ex¬ 
 pression of the beauty which turns a utilitarian 
 building into a great artistic production. 
 
 Pictures again will surely be mostly used for 
 
232 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 the decoration of buildings which are specially 
 public; the circumstances of a society free from 
 chronic war, public, corporate, and private, can 
 not fail to affect this art largely, at least in its 
 subjects, and probably will reduce its independ¬ 
 ent importance. The arts deduced from it, such 
 as engraving, will be no doubt widespread and 
 much used by persons in their private capacities. 
 
 As to literature, fiction as it is called, when a 
 peaceful and happy society has been some time 
 afoot, will probably die out for want of material. 
 The pabulum of the modern novel in its various 
 dressings is mostly provided by the anomalies and 
 futilities of a society of inequality wielded by a 
 conventional false sense of duty, which produces 
 the necessary imbroglio wherewith to embarrass 
 the hero and heroine through the due number of 
 pages. Literature, however, need by no means 
 die; for we can neither limit nor foresee the 
 development of the great art of poetry which has 
 changed so little in essentials since the Homeric 
 epics. 
 
 We must also note the difference (not gener¬ 
 ally considered) between literature as a fine art 
 and the numberless useful books which are ad¬ 
 juncts, or tools rather, for other occupations, 
 physical science in all its branches among the 
 number. Science again will be freed from the 
 utilitarian chains which commerce has cast over 
 it, and, cultivated once more for its own sake, 
 and not merely as a servant of profit-making 
 industrialism, may be expected to develop in a 
 manner at present undreamed of. 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 233 
 
 To return again to the subject of art proper. 
 Of ancient Music we know little in spite of 
 Aristotle and Boetius. Modern music begins 
 at the close of the Middle Ages with the 
 birth of counterpoint; its great develop¬ 
 ment has been during the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries, and has been in its 
 earlier period synchronous with the most 
 degraded period of all the other arts. Classical 
 music (technically so-called) would seem to have 
 reached its zenith about the middle of the pres¬ 
 ent century; but the great revolution in dramatic 
 music, effected by Wagner during the second half 
 of the century, has occupied the field for the pres¬ 
 ent, though what future developments it may 
 have we cannot foresee. Of one thing, however, 
 we may be very certain, that under a quite 
 changed social condition Music will develop com¬ 
 pletely new styles of its own no less than the other 
 arts. And in our belief Music and Architecture, 
 each in its widest sense, will form the most seri¬ 
 ous occupation of the greatest number of people. 
 In this connection we may observe that Music is 
 on the excutive side largely dependent on co¬ 
 operation, notwithstanding that on the creative 
 side it is more, rather than less, individual than 
 painting. 
 
 , A word may be said about the Drama, con¬ 
 nected as it is on one side with Music and on 
 the other with Literature. It is again as to its 
 execution wholly a co-operative art, while its 
 creation is necessarily subordinate to the possi¬ 
 bilities of execution inherent in a given time and 
 
234 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 place. For the rest its production does not re¬ 
 quire the same amount of training, as any other 
 
 of the arts: and therefore could be more easily 
 * * 
 
 and pleasantly dealt with by a communal society 
 working co-operatively. 
 
 Though the question of costume may seem a 
 petty one, it has much to do with the pleasure 
 of life. In the future the tyranny of convention 
 will be abolished; reason and a sense of pleasure 
 will rule. It must be remembered that bad 
 costume, of which there are hardly any examples 
 before the Tudor period, always either muffles 
 up or caricatures the body; whereas good costume 
 at once veils and indicates it. Another fault 
 may be noted in all bad periods (as in the pres¬ 
 ent), that an extreme difference is made between 
 the garments of the sexes. It is not too much to 
 hope that the future society which will revoluion- 
 ize architecture, will not fail to do as much for 
 costume, which is as necessary an adornment as 
 architecture. 
 
 To turn to some other phases of life under 
 the new order. We believe that on no consider¬ 
 ation will the dirt and squalor which now dis¬ 
 grace a manufactory or a railway station be 
 tolerated. As things go this wretchedness of 
 externals is unchallenged because, once more, 
 it does not pay■ even to reduce the filth to a mini- * 
 mum. But, as we said before, everything that 
 makes totvards the pleasure of life in a com¬ 
 munal state will pay if it be possible to be done. 
 Therefore it is clear that the degradation of a 
 whole country by careless industrialism will not 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 235 
 
 be allowed. Granted the dirt and squalor reduced 
 to a minimum, which we think would leave but a 
 small residuum, how is the burden of even that 
 small residuum to be dealt with ? It being under¬ 
 stood that the manufacture in question is a neces¬ 
 sary one, say, for example, iron-founding, there 
 would be two ways, either of which might be 
 chosen. First, to have volunteers working tem¬ 
 porarily in a strictly limited and comparatively 
 small “black-country,” which would have the ad¬ 
 vantage of leaving the rest of the country abso¬ 
 lutely free from the disorder and dirt. And sec¬ 
 ondly, to spread the manufacture in small sections 
 over a territory so large that in each place the 
 disadvantages would be little felt. This would 
 have the gain of enabling those who worked at 
 it to live amidst tolerably agreeable surround¬ 
 ings. 
 
 A difficulty of the same sort would have to be 
 met with in the towns. Great aggregations of 
 houses would clearly not be absolutely necessary. 
 These are now of two kinds: first, the manu¬ 
 facturing towns, which are seldom capitals, or 
 of importance as centers of anything else than 
 the commerce connected with their special indus¬ 
 tries. Manchester being an obvious example of 
 this class of great town. The other kind of over¬ 
 grown town gives us examples of great capitals, 
 which are essentially seats of centralized gov¬ 
 ernment, and of general financial operations, and 
 incidentally and consequently of intellectual move¬ 
 ment. For example, institutions like the British 
 Museum, the Louvre or Bibliotheque Nationale, 
 
236 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 the Berlin Royal Library, or the Galleries at 
 Dresden could hardly exist except in capital cities. 
 As to the manufacturing towns, it is clear that 
 according to either of the theories of factory 
 work put forward above, they would be super¬ 
 fluous, while on the other hand there would be 
 no great centers of government or finance to at¬ 
 tract huge populations or to keep them together. 
 In the future therefore towns and cities will be 
 built and inhabited simply as convenient and 
 pleasurable systems of dwelling-houses, which 
 would include of course all desirable public build¬ 
 ings. 
 
 Again we give three theories of the trans¬ 
 formation of the modern town, industrial or capi¬ 
 tal, into the kind of entity to suit the new social 
 conditions. The first would leave the great towns 
 still existing, but would limit the population on 
 any given space; it would insist on cleanliness 
 and airiness, the surrounding and segregation of 
 the houses by gardens; the erecting of noble 
 public buildings; the maintenance of educational 
 institutions of all kinds—of theatres, libraries, 
 workshops, taverns, kitchens, etc. This kind of 
 town might be of considerable magnitude, and the 
 houses in it might not be very different in size 
 and arrangement from what they are now, al¬ 
 though the life lived in them would have been 
 transformed. It is understood of course that 
 any association in dwelling in such places would 
 be quite voluntary, although in view of the limi¬ 
 tation above mentioned, no individual or group 
 could be allowed to engross an undue area. 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 237 
 
 The second method of dealing with the un¬ 
 organized and anarchic towns of today proposes 
 their practical abolition, and the supplanting of 
 them in the main by combined dwellings built 
 more or less on the plan of the colleges of our 
 older English universities. As to the size of 
 these, that would have to be determined by con¬ 
 venience in each case, but the tendency would be 
 to make them so large as to be almost small towns 
 of themselves; since they would have to include 
 a large population in order to foster the neces¬ 
 sary give and take of intellectual intercourse, 
 and make them more or less independent for 
 ordinary occupation and amusement. 
 
 It is to be understood that this system of dwell¬ 
 ings would not necessarily preclude the existence 
 of quite small groups, and houses suitable to 
 them, although we think that these would tend 
 to become mere eccentricities. 
 
 Yet another suggestion may be sketched as 
 follows: a center of a community, which can be 
 described as a very small town with big houses, 
 including various public buildings, the whole 
 probably grouped about an open space. Then a 
 belt of houses gradually diminishing in number 
 and more and more spaced out, till at last the 
 6pen country should be reached, where the dwell¬ 
 ings, which would include some of the above- 
 mentioned colleges, should be sporadic. 
 
 We might go on furnishing suggestions, in 
 which, however, as above, cross divisions are sure 
 to occur. What we have given, however, we 
 think quite enough, for they are clearly the birth 
 
238 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 of our own prepossessions. One thing, however, 
 all such schemes must take for granted as a 
 matter of principle, to-wit, the doing away ,of 
 all antagonism between town and country, and 
 all tendency for the one to suck the life out of 
 the other. 
 
 As regards Education, it should be borne in 
 mind that it must of necessity cease to be a 
 preparation for a life of commercial success on 
 the one hand, or of irresponsible labor on the 
 other; and therefore in either case a short and 
 perfunctory exercise with a definite object, more 
 or less sordid in view. It will become rather 
 a habit of making the best of the individual pow¬ 
 ers in all directions to which he is led by his 
 innate disposition; so that no man will ever “fin¬ 
 ish” his education while he is alive, and his early 
 training will never lie behind him a piece of mere 
 waste, as it most often does now. 
 
 In what we have been stating we have only 
 been dealing with some of the elementary prin¬ 
 ciples of Socialism Triumphant, and certain of 
 those aspects of life resulting from them that 
 lie nearest the surface; but at least we have tried 
 to make our belief clear, that in the new order 
 of things, while no one will be hampered by 
 false ideas of duty, every one will have before 
 him a broad ideal by which he may regulate his 
 conduct with assurance and peace of mind. He 
 will find his pleasure in the satisfaction, first, of 
 his bodily desires, and then of the intellectual, 
 moral, and aesthetic needs which will inevitably 
 arise when a man is not at odds with his body, 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 239 
 
 and is not exhausting his intellect in a vain 
 combat with its urgent promptings. It will be 
 necessary for him then as always to labor in 
 order to live, but he will share that labor in equit¬ 
 able proportions with all his fellows; and, more¬ 
 over, he will at last be able to turn man’s mas¬ 
 tery over nature to account in relieving him of 
 the mere drudgery of toil. What remains of 
 labor, by wise use of opportunity and due ob¬ 
 servation of the various capacities of mankind he 
 will turn into a pleasurable exercise of his 
 energies; and thus between his rest and his work 
 will at the least lead a life of happiness, which 
 he will be able to enjoy without imputing it to 
 himself for wickedness; a habit of mind which, 
 under the prevailing ethical ideas, casts a gloom 
 over so many of those who may be considered 
 to belong to the more intellectual of the well- 
 to-do classes. 
 
 As to his external surroundings, the society 
 of the future will be wealthy enough to spare 
 labor from the production of the only things 
 now allowed to be utilities, for cultivating the 
 decencies of life, so that all manufacture will be 
 carried on in an orderly and cleanly manner, and 
 the face of the earth will be beautified and not 
 degraded by man’s labor and habitation. An¬ 
 other tyranny will be overthrown in our release 
 from the compulsion of living in overgrown and 
 overcrowded towns, and our houses and their 
 surroundings will be dealt with in a reasonable 
 manner. 
 
 Education will no longer be applied to the 
 
240 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 fortuitous cramming of unwilling children, and 
 of young men intensely desirous of doing any¬ 
 thing else than being educated—and only sub¬ 
 mitting to that process for the sake of getting 
 on in their careers—and will become one of 
 the most serious businesses of life even to men 
 of the greatest natural capacities. Such a life, 
 it is clear, will be pretty much the reverse of that 
 which some opponents of the new order, scien¬ 
 tists as well as meaner personages, profess to 
 see in the advancing “tyranny of Socialism.” 
 But we are convinced that this life, which means 
 general happiness for all men, free from any sub¬ 
 stratum of slavery, will be forced on the world. 
 Yet that world will not be wholly conscious of the 
 gradual and natural compulsion which it will 
 have to yield to, and which it will find by its 
 results to have been wholly beneficent. 
 
 We may be asked, since we have been con¬ 
 tinuously putting forth the doctrine of evolution 
 throughout these pages, what Socialism in its 
 turn will evolve. We can only answer that 
 Socialism denies the finality of human progress, 
 and that any particular form of Socialism of 
 which we can now conceive must necessarily give 
 way before fresh and higher developments, of 
 the nature of which, however, we can form no 
 idea. These developments are necessarily hidden 
 from us by the unfinished struggle in which 
 we live, and in which therefore for us the su¬ 
 preme goal must be Socialism as we have here 
 expounded it. We would be the very last to 
 wish to set any bounds to human ideals or 
 
SOCIALISM TRIUMPHANT 
 
 241 
 
 aspirations; but the Socialism which we can fore¬ 
 see, and which promises to us the elevation of 
 mankind to a level of intelligent happiness and 
 pleasurable energy unattained as yet, is to us 
 enough as an ideal for our aspirations and as an 
 incentive to our action. 
 
 NOTE ON THE “CITY.” 
 
 (Cf. Cap. II.) 
 
 In Hebrew history the point referred to in the text 
 may be remarked in the confusion of ideas between 
 the mere Burg or hill fortress (Zion or Sihon) of the 
 earlier days of Jerusalem and the later developed Holy 
 City, schism from which was criminal in the eyes of 
 the pious Hebrew, as the earliest seat of the federal¬ 
 ized nation. The same thing is obvious in the genealog¬ 
 ical history of Early Greece, of which we may take 
 Athens as a type; the great tragedies, as the trilogies 
 of ZEschylus, illustrate this, the actual city playing its 
 part in the scenery as in the Eumenides. Here then we 
 have three great cities—Troy, Jerusalem, Athens, pro¬ 
 claiming themselves obviously as centres of the new so¬ 
 ciety and rising conspicuously above the welter of the 
 tribes and the peods; but though these are obvious 
 cases, the same thing was going on throughout the 
 whole of the growing world of ancient civilization. 
 The Oriental monarchies, when looked at closely, turn 
 out to have been compressed confederacies of cities. 
 These flourished so long as the cities composing them 
 retained some individuality, but their life was at last 
 crushed out by monarchial and despotic centralization. 
 As a consequence the system which they formed was 
 either broken up by the surrounding uncivilized tribes, 
 as Accadian Babylon by the Assyrians, and Assyria 
 in its turn by the Medes, or stagnated into huge life¬ 
 less bureaucracies, as in the case of China or Egypt. 
 The life of the latter existed in the emulation of the 
 cities of Memphis, Thebes, etc., and lay in abeyance 
 between the time of the Persian invasion and the rise 
 under the Ptolemies of the Greek city of Alexandria. 
 
242 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 Everywhere, in short, in the ancient world, one is 
 struck by the preponderance of the city. Tyre is a 
 mighty power, Carthage a great empire; nay, the mere 
 material aggregation of buildings, the shrine, so to say, 
 of the city-organization, is all-important, and the terri¬ 
 tory a mere farm or recruitng ground; the long walls 
 fall to the music of Lysander’s flutes, and Athens be¬ 
 comes an appanage of the Dorians; Carthaginian walls 
 are breached, and the huge Semitic empire becomes 
 a part of the realm of the mightiest city of all. No¬ 
 where is there independence, unity, progress, save where 
 a city knits up the energies and gives form to the 
 aspirations of men, providing an aim for which their 
 virtue (valor) may expend itself. 
 
 It may here be noted that during all this time ethics 
 and religion were developing on one line; in the earlier 
 barbarism there was no distinction between society and 
 nature; man was the sole rational type; the gods 
 were wholly anthropomorphous, and even amidst the 
 delicate poetry of Homer at times grotesquely so; man 
 was everything, the rest was homogeneous with him. 
 Nature-gods were the ancestors of society, the heads 
 of gentes and tribes traced their descent quite frankly 
 by mere begettal from the highest. Heracles, Jove, 
 Mavors, Woden were no forces exterior to the life of 
 the existing people of the Hellenes, the Latins, or the 
 Goths, but veritable material ancestors, so many counted 
 generations back. Their most tragic stories, embodied 
 in the noblest poetry which the world has seen, and 
 perhaps will ever see,—looked upon as no chance fic¬ 
 tions or literary inventions, but rather as pieces of in¬ 
 spired history,—were but episodes of the great story, 
 blossoms of the genealogical, tree of the existing child 
 of Atreus or Wolsmeg. This tendency for the identi¬ 
 fication of man with everything sensible or insensible, 
 animate or inanimate, is again illustrated by totem 
 worship, necessitated also by the more obvious reason 
 of the early absence of monogamous or even polyga¬ 
 mous institutions. The gods themselves change with¬ 
 out degradation into the forms of beast and bird, so 
 that the chiefs of the gens could feel no shame in 
 
243 
 
 NOTE ON THE “CITY” 
 
 taking their names from the bear, the wolf, or the 
 eagle, and giving them in turn to the whole groups. 
 Amongst the Hebrews, too, it is clear that the so- 
 called patriarchs were really nature-gods; the names 
 of chiefs were frequently compounded of the word 
 Baal—that is “god,” a fact naively recognized by the 
 historians of the later and orthodox period by their 
 changing Baal into El or Ja, the special names of the 
 Hebrew tribal God. Similarly Abram is the high 
 heaven, like Zeus or Jove. 
 
 This line of religion was still followed up in the 
 period of ancient civilization; the state and religion 
 were one, as is indicated amongst other things by the 
 temples having been used as popular meeting-places for 
 pleasure, law or business. In short, in the ancient 
 world, religion was ancestor-worship, developing, as 
 the gens and the peod gave place to the city, into 
 city-worship, in which the individual only felt his 
 more elevated life as a part of the Holy City that had 
 made him and his what they were, and would lead them 
 to all excellence and glory. 
 
 We have mentioned that the city-confederacies of the 
 East which assumed the appearance to later ages of 
 great despotic monarchies fell either into demoraliza¬ 
 tion or languid bureaucracy. From Asia the lead in 
 civilization passed to Europe, and the progress of hu¬ 
 manity became speedy and brilliant. But the Ancient 
 Civilization, incomplete, founded on oligarchy, political 
 and intellectual, and on industrial slavery of the crud¬ 
 est kind, had to undergo the law of change. The Greek 
 cities, after fierce struggles among themselves for the 
 leadership of their world, fell, destroyed by individual 
 greed for position and fame, that took the place of 
 the old city-worship. Their fall was helped by the 
 new system of individualistic ethics, which put forward 
 as the aim of life the excellence and moral qualities 
 of the individual, looked at in himself, instead of those 
 of the society of which he formed a part. Thus Greek 
 civilization fell into the clutches of the Tyrants, and 
 again the lead passed westward into the hands of 
 Rome—the most complete, self-contained and powerful 
 
244 
 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 development of the city-world. But again, as her 
 power grew and the wealth of her oligarchy with it, 
 the doom was awaiting; the boundless greed of the 
 great slave-holding and tax-gathering capitalists, the 
 conquerors of the ancient world, led them into a condi¬ 
 tion of chaos, from which they had to be rescued by an 
 imperial bureaucracy. It was the function of the latter, 
 on the one hand, to keep peace between the competitors 
 for monstrous wealth, and, on the other, to hold down 
 and pacify the proletariat and subject barbarians, on 
 whom the oligarchy fed. Steady degradation followed 
 the Augustan “Pax Romana ”; the whole of the mighty 
 power of Rome, the growth of so many centuries of 
 energy and valor, was prostituted to the squeezing of 
 taxes from the Roman world; the very form of the 
 city-society was reduced to an absurdity by the sale 
 of citizenship, until Caracalla abolished its mere form, 
 extending it to all freed men. At last the Roman 
 armies were wholly composed of Gauls and Goths, 
 Armenians and Arabs; no Italian could be found will¬ 
 ing to fight for his life much less for the sham state, 
 good only for tax-gathering, which now represented the 
 once great city. Rome fell, and with it the Ancient 
 World, 
 
What Isa Man? 
 
 That is a very old question and there have been many 
 guesses at it. Man is a thinking creature, but before 
 he became a thinker he was an animal. Gradually he 
 developed—evolved, as we say today—and became a 
 complex being. In his upward growth he passed through 
 many different stages and changes. What the nature 
 of that evolution has been and the mysteries concerning 
 himself that still remain are the considerations taken up 
 by M. H. Fitch in his book, 
 
 The Physical Basis of 
 Mind and Morals 
 
 Though never extensively advertised, this was one of 
 the books most in demand throughout the recent Lyceum 
 Lecture Course successfully conducted by the Socialist 
 party, showing that many people had discovered the 
 book for themselves and had told of its merit. It is 
 probably the best and most comprehensive statement of 
 the evolutionary theory of man and his brain extant. It 
 is a book for the student who would krow and under¬ 
 stand. 
 
 Cloth bound, 427 pages, large, clear type. Price, post¬ 
 paid, $1.00. Send $1.00 for a year’s subscription to the 
 International Socialist Review and get it for 50c. Sent 
 FREE to subscribers for the Review fcr one NEW yearly 
 subscription. 
 
 CHARLES H. KERR $ COMPANY 
 
 118 West Kinzie Street, Chicag© 
 
TRUTHFUL BOOKS ON 
 THE SEX QUESTION 
 
 Victims Of tJ»C System, by Dorothy Johns. A socialist 
 woman was thrown into jail at Los Angeles in the course of a free* 
 speech fight, which, by the way, was won. In this book she tells some 
 of the things she saw among the women prisoners. Paper, 10c. 
 
 Tfie Social Evil, by Dr. J. H. Greer. A scientific treatise 
 by a socialist physician, showing that prostitution is a necessary out- 
 come of the profit system and that it will end only when the system 
 ends. Paper 10c. 
 
 Tfie Ret>e* by May Beals. Seventeen stories 
 
 0ack London says thev are “full of the fine spirit of revolt”) most o{ 
 them dealing with the social position of woman in the United States 
 today. Cloth, 50c. 
 
 STYze ROM Door, br Estelle Ba^er, The story ol a house 
 of prostitution, and of the actual l ; ve« of four g 5 'ls who were forced in¬ 
 to it. each in a different way, and held prisoners there of relentless 
 social forces that crushes out their lives for the sake of PROFITS 
 Cloth, illustrated, $1.00. 
 
 Gracia, a SociaJ Tragedy, by Frank Everett Plum¬ 
 mer. A story in verse with a similar message. Fourth edition jus,, 
 ready. Extra cloth, with twelve engraving from pnotographs, $1.00. 
 
 Love's Com^g-of-Age^ by Edward Carpenter. A vol 
 ume of thought-compelling essays by a write* who is scientist and pon 
 in one, otherwise he never could have written of the relations betwee, 
 men and women with such convincing logic aud such deep insight 
 Cloth, $100. 
 
 Looking Forward, by Philip Rapoaport. A scientist 
 study of the status of woman, past, present and future, and cf »he origin 
 and growth of the family and the state. The writer is an American 
 socialist with a clear understanding of economic determinism Cloth 
 $ 1 . 00 . 
 
 ■ - . ■■ ■■ ■. i I' m 
 
 Prices include Postage 
 
 CHARLES H. KERR & CO., 118 W. Kinzie St., Chic*** 
 
“MEXICO, or more properly DIAZ, challenged for 
 I barbarity, does not answer convincingly.” These 
 words are quoted not from any revolutionist, but 
 from the editorial page of one of the greatest capi- 
 I talist newspapers, the Chicago Tribune. The “chal- 
 S lenge” to which the Tribune refers is 
 
 I BARBAROUS MEXICO 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN KENNETH TURNER 
 
 “The truth regarding the slaves of Yucatan, of the 
 Valle National and the Valley of Death is a grue¬ 
 some, horrible story of wretched human beings kid¬ 
 naped, whipped and worked to death in behalf of 
 Mexican, American and European capitalists. . . . 
 Around this atrocious system of extracting dividends 
 from the bodies of men, women and children, the 
 slavers have organized a police, military and govern¬ 
 ment machine with such efficient auxiliaries as press 
 and other agents of publicity to keep the truth from 
 the world. . . The American partners of the Mexican 
 savage include the big press agencies, American mil¬ 
 lionaires who have enormous investments in Mexico, 
 and the federal government at Washington. For a 
 number of years the federal government has lent its 
 police powers to Diaz in the endeavor to turn Mexi¬ 
 can liberals over to the Mexican hangmen. 
 
 “All this and much more is portrayed in BARBAR¬ 
 OUS MEXICO. It is one of THE books of the year 
 just passed into history. It is the complete story, 
 part of which’ appeared in an eastern magazine and 
 was suppressed. The book is handsomely bound in 
 blue cloth and stamped in gold, and is one of the 
 most attractive volumes that has come from the press 
 of this house in years .”—James Oneal. 
 
 357 pages, including 17 pages of photographs, $1.50 
 postpaid. 
 
 Charles H. Kerr 6 Company 
 
 118 W. KINZIE ST. s CHICAGO 
 

 TRe 
 
 International Socialist 
 
 Review 
 
 OF, BY AND FOR THE PROLETARIAT 
 
 The only great illustrated magazine 
 that stands squarely for the revolutionary 
 movement of the working class. 
 
 The little producers, who own a little 
 capital, do a little work, and want a lit¬ 
 tle reform, are being brushed to one side 
 to make room for the greatest battle the 
 world has ever seen. 
 
 On the one side are the great capital¬ 
 ists with a working and fighting organiza- 
 tion that is stronger than all the govern¬ 
 ments of the world, and uses these gov* 
 ernments at its pleasure. 
 
 On the other side are the wage-workers, 
 just awakening to the fact that they pro¬ 
 duce everything and have nothing, irre¬ 
 sistible in numbers, the only class without 
 which the work of the world could not go 
 on, but still blindly groping for an organ • 
 ization through which they can act to¬ 
 gether to take and enjoy what they pro¬ 
 duce. 
 
 Month by month the great capitalists 
 are invading new fields, subduing the 
 
PURITANISM 
 
 What is the economic basis for the demand, 
 which we see occasionally cropping out even 
 now, to limit the length of a girl’s bathing 
 Wait by law? 
 
 Perhaps you have never thought of it, but 
 the pious horror of a short bathing suit is 
 closely related to early rising, political reform, 
 Sunday baseball games, religous revivals, the 
 “double standard of morality,” the nude in 
 art, woman suffrage, and the consumption of 
 
 MINCE FIE 
 
 If such a. statement seems to you far¬ 
 fetched, then you will derive instruction as 
 well as enjoyment from a close reading of* 
 Clarence Meily’s new book, “Puritanism,” 
 which is just off the press. 
 
 This little book will enable the' American 
 people, and the British as well, to understand 
 themselves as they never have before, because 
 we have inherited a large share of our ideas 
 from our Puritan ancestors. It presents a 
 fascinating study in that theory which has 
 done so much to make clear to Socialists the 
 meaning of life—the theory, nay, the fact, 
 that the way people make their living largely 
 determines their notions of what is right and 
 moral and proper. No American should fail 
 to read this book. It will enable him to 
 understand the history of this country better 
 than a library full of ordinary text books. 
 It will clean out of his brain any remaining 
 infection left there by past teachings and will 
 enable him to see clearly through problems 
 out of which our capitalist-minded lawmakers, 
 preachers, professors, and editors are making 
 a mess. A reading of this book will forever 
 prevent any Socialist legislator from meddling 
 with middle class “moral reforms.” Attrac¬ 
 tively bound in cloth and well printed. Price, 
 60 cents postpaid. 
 
 CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY, 
 
 118 West Kinzie St., Chicago. 
 
THE MILITANT PROLETARIAT 
 
 Austui Lewis, already long recognized 
 as one of the foremost Socialist writers 
 in America, has now made what time 
 will prove to be the most valuable 
 American contribution to the literature 
 of Socialism thus far produced. His new 
 book, The Militant Proletariat, applies 
 the fundamental principles of Socialism 
 to the most recent economic and social 
 developments. The great Socialist 
 classics were written a generation or 
 more ago. Marx prophesied the Ameri¬ 
 can trust. Now in all its fullness it is 
 here. How is it to be met by the politi¬ 
 cal and industrial organizations of the 
 working class? For five years heated 
 discussions have centered around this 
 question. In The Militant Proletariat 
 Austin Lewis presents the most valuable 
 results of this discussion. No wide¬ 
 awake Socialist will fail to read it. Cloth, 
 £0 cents. 
 
 CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY, 
 118 West Kinzie Street, Chicago. 
 
Socialism for Students 
 
 By Joseph E. Cohen 
 
 Not only students but working-men can easily under¬ 
 stand the contents of the book. The fundamental 
 principles of Socialism are made clear by the author, 
 and the volume is worth reading by Socialists as well 
 as non-Socialists .—The Modern View. 
 
 The purpose of this pocket-size volume is the brief 
 indication of the salient and settled points of the 
 Socialist philosophy for the student, who is expected 
 to fill in nis knowledge by the study of the books 
 indicated in a bibliography at the end of the book. 
 The work is admirably adapted to that end. 
 
 —Chicago Evening Post. 
 
 The book would be a credit to anyone with a college 
 training, yet “Joe,” like most workingmen, had to get 
 his education from contact with life and study of 
 books after working hours. The result is that he 
 gives us what is perhaps the best general and popular 
 introduction to Socialist science and philosophy that 
 has come from the press in recent years. 
 
 —Amalgamated Journal. 
 
 Extra cloth, 153 pages, 50 cents postpaid. 
 
 The Class Struggle^™} 
 
 By Karl Kautsky 
 
 This work was written in 1892 to explain and defend 
 the Socialist program adopted at Erfurt which still 
 stands practically unchanged. It is generally recog¬ 
 nized as the most authoritative statement of the prin¬ 
 ciples of modern Socialism. Until lately it has been 
 known to American readers only in fragments. This 
 new translation by William E. Bohn, associate editor 
 of the International Socialist Review, will be of im¬ 
 mense value to our American movement. 
 
 Extra cloth, 217 pages, 50 cts.; paper, 25 cts., postpaid. 
 
 Special Offer. Send a dollar for a new yearly sub¬ 
 scription to the International Socialist Review, and we 
 will mail you in return for your trouble a copy of Social¬ 
 ism for Students and a cioth copy or two paper copies of 
 The Class Struggle. Keep on sending in subscriptions 
 and you can get a whole SociPMst library free of any 
 cost to you. Address 
 
 Charles H. Kerr & Company 
 
 118 West Kinzie Street, Chicane 
 
STUDY SOCIALISM 
 
 Every day people write us asking “What books must I 
 read in order to understand Socialism?” To meet this 
 demand we have assembled our Beginners’ Combination. 
 Don’t imagine that you know all about Socialism because 
 you have heard a Socialist speaker and have read a book 
 or two. Socialism is no high-brow science, but it rests 
 on certain fundamental principles which must be thor¬ 
 oughly grasped. These books are not only educative but 
 of absorbing interest. We suggest that you read them 
 in about the order named: 
 
 Revolution, Jack London.$0.05 
 
 Introduction to Socialism, Richardson.05 
 
 Industrial Socialism, Haywood and Bohn. .10 
 
 Science and Socialism, LaMonte.05 
 
 Revolutionary Unionism, Debs.05 
 
 Shop Talks on Economics, Mary E. Marcy.10 
 
 Value, Price and Pofit, Marx.10 
 
 Wage Labor and Capital, Marx.05 
 
 Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels.10 
 
 Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels.10 
 
 The Class Struggle, Kautsky.25 
 
 Socialism, Growt . and Outcome, Morris and Bax.. .50 
 International Socialist. Review (one year). 1.00 
 
 Total ....•: .$2.50 
 
 Remit $1.50 and get this lot postpaid. Use this coupon: 
 
 CHARLES' H. KERR & CO. 
 
 118 W. Kinzie St., Chicago. 
 
 Enclosed find $1.50 for which please mail at 
 once your Beginners’ Combination of Socialist 
 literature. 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 i 
 
 I 
 
 i 
 
 I 
 
 Name. .. 
 Address 
 P. O.... 
 
 State 
 

Date Due 
 
 
 
 
 
 7 17-if. 
 
 ty'&us 
 
 f 
 
 
 7 17 -3 4* 
 
 , /y /-/- 
 
 /V 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 0 
 
 -z 
 
 
 nun 
 
 4 ?? 
 
 >4/ 
 
 
 MGR 27 '62 
 
 10 3 t 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Mail's? 
 
 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 
 JuH-tJ’66 
 
 
 
 
 mrz 
 
 50 !97| 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 m? 
 
 ^ ! 9?3 
 
 
 
 j/zu/ZI 
 
 
 
 
 / ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 » 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 t 
 
 
 
 

 L 
 
 fth i i is, yf> yL fiat 
 
 uw 
 
 ■ /v\ 7 
 
 ' BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. 
 
 Books may be kept for two weeks and may 
 be renewed for the same period, unless re¬ 
 served. 
 
 Two cents a day is charged for each book 
 kept overtime. 
 
 If you cannot find what you want, ask the 
 Librarian who will be glad to help you. 
 
 The borrower is responsible for books drawn 
 on his card and for all fines accruing on the 
 
 . 
 
 same.