h

:=i^^

•UNIVERS/,,

Studies in Socialism

By

Jean Jaurès

Translated, with an Introduction, by Mildred Minturn

Authorised English Version

G. P. Putnam's Sons

New Yori^ and London

XLbc IRnlchcrbocFîer iptegs

1906

3^^0^

Copyright, igo6

BY

MILDRED MINTURN

Ube ftnfcfterboclter press, "fflcw lt?orft

HX

CONTENTS

PÂGB

Transi,ator's Introduction .... v

SOCIALISE/ AND LIFE

I— The Sociawst Aim 3

II — Socialism and Life .... 10

III — The Radicai^ and Private Property . 23

rv— Rough Outi^ines 34

RE VOL UTIONAR Y E VOL UTION

V — After Fifty Years VI— Revoi,utionary Majorities VII— Some Sayings of Lieernecht

VIII— LlEBKNECHT on SOCIAWST TaCTICS

IX— "To Expand, not to Contract"

X— SOCIAUSM AND THE PRIVII,EGED CI,ASSES

XI— The Necessity for a Majority iii

43 51 60 70 79 Ô7 94

iv Contents

XII — The Gênerai, Strike and Revolution . io6

XIII— The Question op Method . . . 130

MISCELLANEOUS

XIV — Speech at the Anglo-French Parlia- ,

MENTARY Dinner 170

XV— Truth or Fiction ? 176

XVI— Moonlight 184

Index 193

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

The following essays were first published in a Socialist daily paper in Paris, and are therefore addressed to a public not only well versed in the main theories of Socialism, but in the various questions that have arisen since Socialist ideas have ceased to be merely theories and have be- come crystallised into party programmes. In America, however, we cannot take for granted, as M. Jaurès does, a familiarity with these ideas, and it has therefore seemed best to prefix to a translation of his essays a summary of the funda- mental Socialist theories and of the various methods advocated.

Although Socialists differ upon many points, they all agree on the following main definition:

Socialism is the doctrine that the means of pro- duction (that is, capital, land, and raw materials, or in other words, all wealth which is used for the creation of more wealth) should not be owned by individuals, but by society.

In order to understand the process of thought by which Socialists have arrived at this formula, we may imagine an unprejudiced observer of a philosophic turn of mind who has set himself to

vi Translator's Introduction

consider the spectacle offered by modern societies, and to judge it according to two standards, the standard of abstract justice and the standard of social expediency.

The first thing that will strike such an observer is the extraordinary difference in the amount of material comfort enjoyed by different members of the same political group, a difference so great that the community may be almost said to represent two civilisations; and the next thing will probably be the difference in social standing, which practically divides the community into groups of masters and servants.

As he looks about him he sees some men be- ginning to work at sordid and unpleasant labour at seven o'clock in the morning and keeping on till six at night, and at the end of such a day go- ing home to a two-room tenement; he sees that they and their wives and children are under- nourished, that their clothing is insufficient, and that all the conditions of their lives are unsanitary and uncivilised/ And he sees some men whose

1 " In this community, the saddest in which I have ever lived, fully fifty thousand men, women, and children were all the time in poverty, or on the verge of poverty. It would not be possible to describe how they worked and starved and ached to rise out of it. They broke their health down ; the men acquired in this particular trade a painful and disabling rheumatism, and consumption

Translator's Introduction vii

work is far lighter and more agreeable, or who do not work at all, and yet whose lives are made up of every material satisfaction their imaginations can conceive. Although between these two ex- tremes there exist an almost infinite number of degrees of wealth, statistics will tell him that in both England and America ' ' nine tenths of all the realised property to-day belongs to a class that comprises only one tenth of the population — that ninety per cent, of the citizens, the great mass of the people, share among them, even including their little homes and furniture, and all their much- vaunted hoards, the ownership of not more than ten per cent, of the capital wealth." ' It is for this upper tenth of the population that all the luxuries and most of the comforts of life are

was very common. The girls and boys followed in the paths of their parents. The wages were so low that the men alone often could not support their families, and mothers with babies toiled in order to add to the income. They gave up all thought of joyful living, probably in the hope that by tremendous exertion they could overcome their poverty ; but they gained while at work only enough to keep their bodies alive. Theirs was a sort of treadmill existence, with no prospect of anything else in life but more treadmill. . . . There are probably in fairly prosperous years no less than ten million persons in poverty ; that is to say, underfed, underclothed, and poorly housed. . . . Nearly half of the families in the country are property less." — Robert Hunter, Poverty, pp. 324, 325, and 337.

' See Introduction to 1902 edition oî Problems of Mod- ern Industry, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, p. viii.

viii Translator's Introduction

manufactured. For them the best books are written, the best plays acted, the fastest steamers hurry across the seas, and all the discoveries of science are applied. It is they who live to the full, it is they who enjoy, who develop men- tally and spiritually through their contact with the beauty and civilisation of their own and other worlds. They are the ones who can pay. But the other nine tenths are condemned not only to physical discomfort but, far more tragi- cally, to a stunting even of their capacity for the higher forms of enjoyment. They cannot pay.

The philosopher will naturally try to discover the reason for this abyss which, in dividing the nation into owners and non-owners, divides it also into two civilisations. He may be tempted to accept the easy generalisation current in society which will run somewhat as follows:

' ' Wealth is in the first instance a reward of industry. It comes to a man as the natural result of the work he performs. If he is very industrious or very skilful and earns more wealth than he needs to satisfy his immediate wants, or if he is very thrifty and sacrifices some of his less pressing desires, he is able to accumulate wealth. This accumulation he will use to create more wealth, and he then becomes a capitalist. The capitalist, therefore, is either an exceptionally industrious, an exceptionally skilful, or an exceptionally ab- stemious man. In any case he is an exceptionally

Translator's Introduction ix

valuable member of the community, and deserves his exceptional rewards. ' '

But a study of the facts will lead our enquirer to discover some weaknesses in this pleasantly simple solution. He will see that up to a certain point the theory holds good, but to a certain point only. It is true that the unskilled labourer, who gives work of least value to the community, re- ceives the lowest wages, the skilled labourer next, the engineer next, and so on. But this compre- hensible ascending scale is thrown out of all pro- portion by the appearance on the scene of the shop-keeping and trading class. The relation between services and rewards becomes confused: the rewards seem to mount up by some magical compound-interest process. Our neat little gen- eralisation about industry and thrift takes on a singularly inadequate, not to say comic, appear- ance when applied to the manipulators of the stock-market or the railroad barons. And in the case of a large number of persons who perform no kind of work whatever (or who perform work that has nothing to do with the source of their wealth) and yet into whose hands a regular supply of wealth flows incessantly, the explanation breaks down altogether.

Another factor has entered in, and this factor is the private ownership of capital. It disturbs the relation between services and rewards; its action illustrates the law " unto him that hath shall be given ' ' without regard to what he has done or is

X Translator's Introduction

doing. Its effect is very similar to that of a mov- ing sidewalk. Nine tenths of the human race walk on their own feet and go fast or slow accord- ing to the strength they have and the effort they put forth. These are the manual workers, arti- sans, and propertyless professional men, whose reward is indeed proportioned to their industry, skill, and thrift. But one tenth are able to jump on to the moving sidewalk, or are deposited there by the effort or favour of others; they get a share of wealth-producing wealth and are carried along by it. They may keep on walking or not just as they choose; if they do they will go a bit faster, if they stand still they will go forward just the same. Some of them may manage to jump on to the faster moving inner circles; these are the men who have manipulated their share of wealth- producing wealth with most success. And some men have never had to walk on the solid resisting earth at all. They cannot imagine what it would be like not to have the moving sidewalk to help them along. They may have neither skill nor ability, but their fathers had, and there they are.

So our philosopher can amend his original an- swer thus: " Wealth is a reward of industry and a reward of thrift, but much more than these, a reward for the possession of wealth."

He will recognise that industry and thrift alone are not enough to give a man a good place on the moving sidewalk. Another quality altogether, a

Translator's Introduction xi

quality which we in America have christened " smartness," takes a man from the ranks of the non-owners and makes him a member of the upper tenth. The smart man can make a shrewd bar- gain, he can foresee the fluctuations in the market, he knows a thousand ways of getting the better of his adversaries in the game known as business competition, he has a keen understanding of cer- tain elementary truths about men and things, and is able to see a little further into the future than other people. Smartness, in the business sense, may be defined as the sum of those qualities that enable a man to get hold of a share of wealth- producing wealth, to enter the owning class.

" What is the point of this argument ? " the de- fender of the status quo might ask; " so long as a man keeps the law, has n't he a right to all the wealth he can get ? ' '

But our philosopher is looking at the question from another point of view. He is interested in a larger justice than is involved in the mere obey- ing of existing laws: it is his business to examine those laws by the standards of abstract right and the advantage of the community as a whole.

Is the division of wealth just, then? Does it, in other words, go to the people who have earned it ? If we are to answer " yes " to this question, we must be able to show that the mere fact of owning wealth contributes in some way to the growth of that wealth, because we have seen that it is the ability to become an owner of wealth, and

xii Translator's Introduction

no other sort of ability, that gives a man a place on the moving sidewalk.

But it is impossible to establish any causal con- nection between the ownership of capital and its wealth-producing quality. It may be owned by a single man, or by a group of men, by an idle woman living in Europe, or by a little child: the owner, as owner, is a negligible quantity. And if the " smart man " is not an organiser or man- ager as well as owner, he contributes nothing to the process of creating the yearly return. The people who make the sidewalk move are those who apply their industry to capital: they are the managers and foremen, the mechanics, artisans, and labourers, the farmers and hewers of wood and drawers of water, all the thousands of men whose hands and brains are used to mould and transform wealth into new shapes, to move it from the place where it is created to the place where it is needed, who gather in the fruits of the earth and who labour to make it yield its increase. In so far as the smart business man uses his brain to help on this great productive process or to facili- tate the exchange of the product, he has earned a share of the common wealth. But as a mere owner he is outside the creative process.

It is clear, then, that our philosopher must an- swer " no " to the question whether the division of wealth is just. It certainly does not go in due proportion to the people who have created it. But is it perhaps distributed according to some

Translator's Introduction xiil

principle of social expediency ? He will ask him- self whether it is well for the community that a premium should be given to the quality of smart- ness at the expense of the qualities of thrift and industry, a premium so great that its benefits accrue not only to the smart man himself but to his children and his children's children, who may have no socially valuable qualities whatever. Is it well for society that the trust organiser should have an income five hundred times as great as that of the college professor, that a good business head should get so much greater a return for its exertions than a fine scientific brain ? And is it well that the son of a bank president should re- ceive, as a reward for merely existing, a share of the common wealth two hundred times as great as that meted out to the civil engineer ? Again the answer must inevitably be " no."

II

But this is not all. Not only are the material desires of the owners satisfied out of all proportion to the work they perform, but they also occupy a position of social superiority which practically divides society into groups of rulers and ruled.

The reason for this is to be found in the con- ditions under which wealth is created. The pro- cess is simple. To live a man must have not only the wealth that he consumes in food, lodging, and clothing to-day, but the means of creating a new supply of that same wealth to-morrow. His

xiv Translator's Introduction

strength and skill are of no use to him unless he has the material on which to exercise them. But as that material is all in the hands of other men, he has to go to them to ask for the privilege of working in order to live. From that moment their power over him begins to be exercised. Though it is true that the owners of wealth need the labour of the non-owner in order to make their wealth yield its increase (or as the optimistic conservatives are so fond of putting it, ' ' Capital and L,abour are partners "), they do not need the labour as much as the labourer needs the wealth. For the labourer's position is essentially a hand- to-mouth one: he must have instant access to the material, while the owners can very well let it stand over for a while if it seems more to their advantage to do so. The most they can lose by delay is an expected addition to their wealth: he loses the necessities of life. From this superior position in the matter of the labour contract it re- sults that the owners or their agents do actually control the conditions of life of the non-owner. They decide in the first place whether he shall work at all: if for any reason it seems more profit- able for them that he should remain in idleness, they deny him access to the material he needs in order to work, and he has no choice but to wait their good pleasure.'

' Robert Hunter states that in America over two million working men are unemployed from four to six months in the year. " If what Charles Booth says is true (and many

Translator's Introduction xv

In the second place, they decree the kind and amount of labour he shall perform and the con- ditions under which he shall perform it: hours of work, sanitation, comfort, safety, are all con- trolled by the owners.

And in the third place, they decide how much of the product he shall have as a reward for his labour, and in so doing they practically determine the quality or quantity of food he can eat, the lodging he can inhabit, the clothes he can wear, the amusement he can indulge in, the degree of health and efficiency he shall enjoy — in a word they may be described as determining by their action the kind of person he is to become and (what is more extraordinary) the kind of people his wife and children shall become.

economists agree with him), that our ' modern system of industry will not work without some unemployed mar- gin, some reserve of labour ' ; if it is necessary, as another economist has said, that for long periods of time large stagnant pools of adult effective labour power must lie rotting in the bodies of their owners, unable to become productive of any form of wealth because they cannot get access to the material of production ; and if, at the same time, facing them in equal idleness are unemployed or under-employed masses of land and capital, mills, mines, etc., which, taken in conjunction with the labour power, are theoretically able to produce wealth for the satisfaction of human wants, if these things are essential to our modern system of production, then the poverty of this large mass of workers must continue unrelieved until the system itself is reorganised." — Hunter, Poverty, pp. 330. 331. and 337.

xvi Translator's Introduction

I do not need to explain that this extreme statement of the case only holds good for the lowest grades of labour of which there is a practi- cally unlimited supply. As soon as the labourer acquires special skill his work has the added value that comes from a limitation in the supply, and the overwhelming advantage of capital is slightly counteracted. This accounts for the reasonable ascending scale of rewards for labour noticed at first. The despotic position of the owners is still more effectually diminished when many non-owners unite and make a single bargain, thus controlling the supply of labour artificially. Though the terms on which the non-owners are able to get access to the wealth of the owners are much more favourable when the former act as a unit, one has only to compare the conditions of life of, for example, the members of the United Mine Workers with those of the presi- dents of the coal-carrying railroads who employ them, in order to form some notion of the degree of equality in bargaining attained even under these most favourable conditions for the non- owners.'

After all the modifying factors have been taken into consideration, it remains generally true that wealth-producing wealth may give to its owners

' For a full discussion of this subject see Sidney and Beatrice Webb, hidnstrial Democracy, Part III., Chap- ters ii. and iii., or The Case for the Factory Acts, edited by Mrs. Sidney Webb.

Translator's Introduction xvii

so great a power over the lives of those who must get at that wealth in order to live that it may fairly be described as tyrannical. Indeed so un- doubted is this power that one of those who exer- cise it felt constrained to account for its existence by declaring, in words that instantly became famous, that in his opinion it was of divine origin; God in His infinite wisdom had chosen certain worthy men to administer the wealth of the country, and the inference was that any re- volt-against their authority was impious. If it is fair to judge any system by the statements that its warmest supporters make concerning it, the present system under which wealth is produced must stand condemned on the strength of the de- fence offered by that railroad president. Accord- ing to the standard of justice and social expediency the process by which wealth is created is as im- perfect as that by which it is divided.

Ill

It would be a mistake, however, to hold the individual owner responsible for social injustice. The tyranny of the owner is in most cases an im- personal tyranny, not deliberate or malevolent, but mechanical, indirect, and inevitable. He does what is called " investing his money," that is, he puts the wealth-producing wealth at his disposal into the hands of a group of other men, organisers, managers, and so on, who take upon

xviii Translator's Introduction

themselves the care of making it yield a certain return. Self-interest and honesty combined make them see to it that he gets as large a return as pos- sible: they are " looking after the interests of their stockholders," and with their eyes fixed on that side of the "labour-contract," they not unnatur- ally disregard the other. One sees constant ex- amples of this during strikes, when the employees urge on the one hand that they are working ten hours a day for a bare " living wage," and the answer of the representative of the employers al- ways is: " But as it is we only just make enough profit to pay our dividends, so any question of raising wages is absurd." The manager of an impersonal business concern may be a most just and tender-hearted man, but as an agent he has no choice but to ensure the profit of his employers before he can consider the " standard of life " of their employees. And the individual owner may be a just and tender-hearted man, but what can one shareholder in a great trust do to change the wages or conditions of work of the employees of the trust ? Our vast organisation of industry has completely separated the owner from the producer. He may feel a sense of responsibility for the lives of those non-owners whose work brings him his yearly quota of comfort and pleasure, but he is as helplessly a part of the system as the poorest labourer.

It is the system and not the individual who profits by it that is the important factor in the

Translator's Introduction xix

situation, and it is therefore not so important to enquire whether the moral character of the indi- vidual can be reformed, as to discover whether the system can be so changed that it will become im- possible for the natural egotism of man to bring about conditions so unjust to the majority and so inexpedient for society as a whole.

But it is precisely at this point that many men who consider themselves particularly unprejudiced and open-minded, stop thinking. They accom- plish this feat by the timely application of a phrase ready-made to suit any emergency: " The struggle for life and the survival of the fittest."

' ' You approach this question from the wrong end altogether," such a man would say. " You talk about social justice and social expediency, but what we are dealing with are Laws of Nature, and Nature knows neither justice nor expediency. What she cares about is the production of types that shall be fit to survive, and her method is pitiless warfare. In the case of man, the struggle for survival is the social struggle. It may not be pretty, but it is necessary. You cannot change Nature: all you can do is to ameliorate conditions a little by prevailing upon the most successful in- dividuals to render the lot of the least successful a little less unendurable, and even that is of doubt- ful benefit to society, which can only advance by the elimination of the ' least fit.' "

This is a seductive theory, but the knowledge of a little history and a little science candidly

XX Translator's Introduction

brought to bear upon it will soon reveal its super- ficial nature. Ever since the first group of sav- ages found that it was safer for them to unite in the eternal fight agaiust the animals and against other savages than to face the hostile world as in- dividuals, there have been two sets of phenomena to be considered: those which have to do with man as an individual, and those which have to do with him as a member of a community. The * ' scientific ' ' critic quoted above forgets that Nature is as much interested in the development of the community as in the development of the individual, and that the process of producing communities fit to survive has had a distinct reac- tion upon the primitive instincts of the individual. The struggle for life can never be done away with, but it has manifested itself under so many different forms in the past that there is no reason to suppose its present form is the permanent one. Society has evolved from savagery to barbarism, from barbarism to feudalism, from feudalism to individualism, and with every change the rela- tions of individuals to each other have been modi- fied, the form of the struggle has altered, and the situation of those individuals who have not been successful is somewhat improved. The position of the modern industrial wage-earner is bad, but it is a step in advance of serfdom, as serfdom was a step in advance of slavery . And if we can j udge society by the situation of its most unfortunate members as a chain is judged by its weakest link,

Translator's Introduction xxi

we must acknowledge that society is moving in the direction of justice.

It is then perfectly legitimate to try to under- stand the essential characteristics of the present form in which the struggle for life is embodied and to compare it with a standard of abstract justice. In so doing we are merely putting our- selves in line with the evolutionary process: we are trying to foresee and, if possible, to help to bring about the new and juster form.

IV

We may imagine that the philosopher with whom we began this enquiry has followed a line of reasoning somewhat like the preceding. He has seen that the creation of a new supply of wealth was due to the joint activities of thousands of individuals and not to the existence, inactive or otherwise, of a single individual who was called the owner of the original supply. Now if private ownership of capital is not a necessary factor in the production of new wealth, and if it is a necessary factor in the unjust distribution of that wealth, our philosopher will ask himself why the problem should not be solved by eliminating the individual owner from the scheme of produc- tion and distribution altogether, and by putting in his place society as a whole.

And when he has grasped this fact, that wealth is a social product, and that, being the product of

xxii Translator's Introduction

society, it should be owned and administered by society for the benefit of all its members and not by individuals for their own benefit, he may call himself a Socialist.

Professor Menger of Vienna has given so clear a statement of the main Socialist theory, that I cannot do better than summarise it here:

"The Socialist, or Popular Labour, State," he says in substance, " rests on the fundamental notion that its primary object is identical with the primary object of each citizen, and this is, the preservation and development of the life of the individual and the propagation of the race. But in order that the State may be able to fulfil this object, it must control those natural riches which are necessary for the maintenance and develop- ment of the individual, instead of the rights over these being vested in a certain number of indi- viduals, as is now the case. We must, however, distinguish between those riches which are not destroyed by use and those which are destroyed by use. The former, when controlled by indi- viduals, bring about the present economic superi- ority of a class, with all the frightful results we know so well: the latter only concern the indi- vidual who uses and destroys them, and are not therefore matters of public concern." *

And Jaurès writes:

" The State must assure to every citizen with-

' Menger, L'Êkit Socialiste, pp. 31-36 (translated into French by Charles Andler).

Translator's Introduction xxiii

out exception the right to life by means of work : that is, the right to labour and to the full product of his labour. If it does this, it will satisfy the most exacting demands of human nature and fulfil its social duty. But it has only one method at its disposal. It must assure to every citizen a part ownership in the means of production, which will have become collective property."

But to make every citizen a part owner in the capital of the community is only the first step in the process of realising social justice. The next and most pressing question is: " How shall the yearly product of this socially owned capital be divided? How can the ends of justice be best attained? "

Many answers to this question have of course been proposed, but they may all be grouped into two main schools, the Socialist proper and the Communist. I quote Menger ' :

" But if the essence of Socialism consists only in the fact that the most important control over wealth is exercised by groups of men more or less large, instead of by individuals, we shall see that this system does not necessarily involve equal division of wealth among the citizens. The wealth destined for the immediate satisfaction of desires may, even in the Socialist State, be divided

' L'État Socialiste, p. 35.

xxiv Translator's Introduction

unequally, according to the quality and quantity of work performed, the rank occupied by each in the State, and many other factors. The great dififerences which we now see will disappear of themselves, since they result from the private ownership of wealth whose utility is permanent. There will be just enough inequality to serve as a spur to effort and a reward for excellence.

" If, however, the principle oi equality be added to the above idea of the Socialist system. Social- ism becomes Communism. Under this system the amount of wealth given to each citizen is quite independent of the quantity and quality of the work he performs and of any difference in the rank he has attained." *

Some Communists hold that the only just prin- ciple is summed up ia the saying: " From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." They show a faith in the altruistic pos- sibilities of human nature that one is tempted to characterise as visionary. Perhaps the time may come when the average man will give his best work to the community without regard to the re- ward he is to receive for it, and will be contented when he sees other men, less able and perhaps

' It should, however, be noted that the word Commun- ism is often used as synonymous with Socialism. Jaurès does not make any distinction, and Marx and Engels called their famous tract The Communist Manifesto, though they did not believe in the equal division of the product among all workers.

Translator's Introduction xxv

less industrious than he, paid at the same rate. There are a few such devoted individuals now, and possibly in the dim future they will be numerous enough to make their mental processes serve as a basis for society. But for all purposes of practical reform, the Socialist principle, in the strict sense of the word, seems to be the only possible one.

The Socialists do not hope to distribute wealth equally among all the workers, or on the basis of the needs of the different individuals: they hold that this would be extremely inadvisable, at least without a long period of training under a system far more equitable than the present one. What they do hope to do is to distribute it in such a way that men will be rewarded as nearly as pos- sible in proportion to the services they perform, and not, as is now the case, partly in proportion to the services they perform and partly in propor- tion to the lien on other men's work that they or their fathers have been able to establish through accumulations of capital.

The practical problem of how wealth is to be divided in proportion to the quantity and quality of the work performed is an extremely delicate and difiBcult one. The simplest solution seems to be that each individual should be required to give a fixed minimum of work to the community, and that he should be paid a minimum wage, large enough to guarantee a good average " standard of life." The exceptionally able or industrious man would contribute more work and would be

xxvi Translator's Introduction

paid in proportion, so that he would be able to provide himself with some of the luxuries of life. Or,if hours were taken as the basis instead of piece- work, the exceptional man who wished to work longer than the minimum day required by the State would be allowed to do so and would be re- warded accordingly-. This system solves the problem of distribution with quantity as the de- termining factor. The factor of quality is far more subtle and would seem to involve the exist- ence of a judging body who should determine the grade to which any given individual belonged. The exceptional man would then be rewarded ac- cording to the grade of excellence he had attained, which would be a rough method of recognising merit/

If we grant the unequal distribution of wealth, some hierarchical grouping of the workers seems almost inevitable. The two great difficulties to be faced would be the possible exaggeration of the differences in rewards given to the members of the different groups and the danger of a cor- rupt official class. We must not forget, however, that it is never capital but only salaries that are to be distributed, and that the means of corruption would therefore be limited. It has also been sug-

' For a full discussion of the question of distribution, see Menger, UEtat Socialiste, Book II., chapters vii. and viii. ; Kelly, Government or Human Evolution, vol. ii., pp. 298-303, 331-336; Vandervelde, Le Collec- tivisme, Part II., chapter iv.

Translator's Introduction xxvii

gested that the economy of a co-operative State would allow so much leisure to its citizens as might result in a strict surveillance of politics and official methods by the average man.

Under the Socialist system the natural dififer- ences between man and man would bring their natural difiFerences in comforts and pleasure, and the average man's mainspring of activity would still be in operation.

But at this point we should note the classic ob- jection to Socialism. Men, it is said, work from two motives, first, in order to amass wealth for themselves, and, second, in order to hand on the fruits of their labour to their children. Socialism would do away with both these motives, and the inference is that men would no longer work.

The error that underlies this criticism is that it is based on an observation of the mental processes of the owning class only. We have seen that the distribution of wealth under our present regime is such that the vast mass of workers never have the faintest hope of accumulating any wealth for themselves, while the idea of leaving anything whatever to their children would seem to them fantastic in the extreme. On the contrary, they count on their children to keep them out of the poorhouse when they are too old to support themselves.

It is, nevertheless, true that under our capital- istic system these two motives are very generally active with the wealthy minority. It has seemed

xxviii Translator's Introduction

to me, however, that the first motive, the desire to accumulate a fortune for oneself, is more subtle in character than the individualists would have us believe. After the first necessities and com- forts have been obtained, what most men really want to get out of life is success. But in almost all cases, success is vulgarly measured in terms of wealth, and so men seek wealth. But in the army and navy, in art, science, and literature, and in the English civil service and English po- litical life, success is measured by the grade at- tained, by various rewards and decorations, by fame or authority over others, things that often bring no corresponding increase of wealth but that are as ardently pursued as wealth itself. They are the measure of success, and, as such, in- finitely desirable.

As for the wish men have to leave a fortune to their children, this too may be attributed to two causes. In the first place, they want to know that their children will never lack the necessities and even the comforts to which they have been accustomed. If they are "self-made" men, they understand too well the diflScult and precarious existence of those who have to face life with no resource but their own skill and labour: they wish to make certain that their children have the inestimably precious aid of a certain accumulation of wealth-producing wealth. But under the Socialist régime, where the "right to life" im- plies suitable work for all and a just and ample

Translator's Introduction xxix

reward for that work, with, of course, proper care for those who are physically unable to support themselves, this natural anxiety on the part of parents would be removed. Every child would have a fair start in life, and no child would have the undue advantage that comes to those who, through no virtue of their own, find themselves in possession of a legal right to share in the pro- duct of the labour of others. For this is the true meaning of inheritance: the father leaves his son a lien on the labour of other men which he him- self has obtained by clever management, special ability, or even by a stroke of luck, the rise or fall of the market, or the mere possession of a piece of land whose value has increased.

The second reason why men desire to leave a large fortune is the same as that which makes them selfishly desire to amass it: because it is one of the ways of gaining distinction. They imagine a newspaper article: " So-and-So died leaving a property of such and such value," or, in our significant phrase, " he was worth such and such a sum." But if this particular scale of personal importance were done away with alto- gether, men would turn their attention to some other means of exalting their own individuality, and would forget that the publication of his will was ever the means of bringing to a man a pa- thetically brief post-mortem distinction.

No, the average man does not work with the idea of ' ' making a fortune, " or of " leaving a

XXX Translator's Introduction

fortune." He works first, because he must work in order to live, and, second, because he wishes to add to the present comfort of himself, his wife, and his children, and perhaps to " lay by some- thing against a rainy day." The last motive would not hold good in a Socialist State, but the other two seem a too essential part of the psychol- ogy of " the man in the street " to be disregarded. Some scale in material rewards there must be, in order to mark degrees of excellence and add somewhat to the comforts of the especially indus- trious or especially able man. But the difiference between the average man and the exceptional man should be only just enough to spur on the latter to give his best work. And since the Socialist State is founded on the principles of jus- tice and expediency, the community would see to it that the exceptional man did not obtain his higher reward until the return for every man's labour was large enough to guarantee him a life worthy of a man and a citizen, a life lived under conditions making for health, civilisation, and the improvement of the race.

VI

There is also a division ot opinion among Socialists as to the administrative organisation which is to manage the collectively-owned wealth. Some believe that the ownership of the means of production should be vested in the nation and

Translator's Introduction xxxi

administered by a trained bureaucracy; others have the ideal of a less centralised politico- economic system, under which the commune or township would be the principal owner and em- ployer of labour; others imagine associations of producers, each group owning and controlling the plant at which it works itself; while still others think that the future society will be a com- bination of all these forms, some property being vested in the nation, some in local government bodies, and some in the organised trades.'

It is interesting, and it may even be profitable, to attempt to foresee the exact form that the

' For a careful attempt to study this question from the legal standpoint, see Professor Monger's D État Socialiste. Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb have sketched their idea of the probable organisation of the Democratic State of the future in the last chapter of bidustrial Detnocracy. A more popular form of forecast is that presented by the Fabian Essays on Socialism. Mr. Bdmond Kelly, in the second volume of Government or Htiman Evolution, gives in some detail another possible solution, which he calls Quasi-Collectivism. Under this system the State will manufacture the necessities of life, and require every citizen to work for it four hours a day. During the re- mainder of the day each man will be free to engage in any occupation he chooses : artists will devote them- selves to their art with minds freed from anxiety, and energetic business men will create supplementary indus- tries on the competitive plan. Since a decent livelihood is assured to every man by his State labour, the unjust advantage that purely capitalistic production gives to the owner is done away with.

xxxii Translator's Introduction

juster social organism will assume. It tends to clear up the ideas of Socialists themselves and may possibly serve as a stimulus to the imagina- tion of those who dismiss the subject by saying: " Oh, yes, all very well in theory, but I can't imagine how you can put all that into practice." But such discussions have, after all, an interest which is chiefly academic: they cannot become of practical moment for many years.

VII

There is, however, a pressing practical question that touches Socialists very closely and divides them very bitterly: this is the problem of what steps "militant" Socialists should take to bring about the establishment of Socialism. As Jaurès is continually touching upon this problem in the following essays, and as he presupposes a certain familiarity with it on the part of his readers, it may perhaps be well to give a preliminary sketch here.

Upon the question of Method, as it is called, European Socialists are separated into two schools: the one, followers of the great militant, Karl Marx, are called Revolutionists, Marxists, or Orthodox; the other. Opportunists, Reformists, Revisionists, Fabians.

The Revolutionary Socialists do not necessarily believe in the use of force to obtain their ends. Indeed, as Jaurès points out, the partisans of the

Translator's Introduction xxxiii

General Strike are the only ones who hope to win by other than legal political methods. But what they do believe in is the possibility of establishing the Socialist system in its entirety, after they shall have obtained political power. They depend upon the ' ' class- warfare ' ' that undoubtedly ex- ists, to bring about a revolution, possibly peaceful in character, which will have for its object the abolition of private property in the means of pro- duction and the substitution of social property in its place. Their method of action, then, is to rouse the non-owners to a sense of their position, and to teach them to look forward to the day when they shall be strong enough to bring about this radical change.

This belief in the " revolutionary " method has two practical results. In the first place, it makes those who hold it indifferent to any less sweeping social reforms: they are working for complete political power and a complete social reconstruc- tion. In the second place, the necessary stress laid upon the antagonism of classes makes them especially unwilling to enter into political alliance with other parties, who represent the owning class, even if such alliance would result in the gain of certain concrete advantages for the non- owners.

The Reformists, on the other hand, think that the coming change is too complex to be instituted as a whole. Their ultimate ideal is the collective ownership of capital, but they believe that they

xxxiv Translator's Introduction

can best reach that ideal by introducing reforms gradually as the strength of their party and eco- nomic conditions admit, instead of hoping to apply a cast-iron dogmatic system as a unit. The de- tails are too complicated, the new factors that may have to be considered in the field of industrial invention alone are too diverse for any cut and dried revolutionary action to meet with success. The general principle on which the Reformists must act is clear enough to them: it guides them in the practical solution of each problem as it pre- sents itself. And by the light of this principle they have formulated in every country party programmes which, according to their Fabian method, will be gradually adopted by the various legislatures.

These Socialist programmes demand as a rule the same general reforms: a legal limitation of the working day, a legal minimum wage, com- pulsory insurance against illness, accidents, and non-employment, old age pensions, compulsory arbitration on the New Zealand pattern, drastic amendment of factory legislation, especially with the object of abolishing child-labour, the substi- tution of an income-tax or land-tax for all in- direct taxation, and, most important perhaps of all, the gradual extension of the domain of public services (national and municipal), beginning with railways, mines, and other "natural monopolies." Socialists are also advocates of at least partial dis- armament and of the extension of international

Translator's Introduction xxxv

arbitration, and most of the party programmes contain statements to that effect.'

It must not be supposed that the orthodox Marxists refuse to endorse the party programme. But whereas the Revolutionists consider legisla- tive reforms as of secondary importance and some extremists even look at them askance as tending to weaken the antagonism between the classes, which they believe to be the essential revolution- ary force, the Revisionists regard such reforms as necessary steps toward the establishment of com- plete Collectivism. They hold, moreover, that every reform is not only a positive gain on the side of justice, a positive advance toward their goal, but also a valuable means of educating the

' The programmes of the principal European Socialist parties are to be found in Modern Socialism^ edited by R. C. K. Eusor (Harpers). I quote the following from the platform adopted by the Socialist Party of the United States of America at Chicago in May, 1904 :

" To the end that the workers may seize every possible advantage that may strengthen them to gain complete control of the powers of government, and thereby the sooner establish the co-operative commonwealth, the So- cialist Party pledges itself to watch and work in both the economic and the political struggle for each successive im- mediate interest of the working class ; for shortened days of labour and increase of wages ; for the insurance of the ■workers against accident, sickness, and lack of employ- ment ; for pensions for aged and exhausted workers ; for the public ownership of the means of transportation, communication, and exchange ; for the graduated taxa- tion of incomes, inheritances, and of franchise and land

xxxvi Translator's Introduction

public mind and preparing the way for the next step.

The very great importance attached to legis- lative action by Reformists leads naturally to their adopting a different attitude toward practical politics. They wish to bring about certain defin- ite reforms, and being always in a minority they must, in order to accomplish anything, enter into alliance with other parties that are willing to carry out at least part of their programme. It is over this question of alliance that the battle within the party has raged. How close shall it be? Shall it be purely temporary, or of indefinite duration ? And shall a Socialist ever be permitted to hold ofiBce in a non-Socialist ministry ? These are the practical questions that agitate European Socialists in all countries.

values, the proceeds to be applied to public employment and bettering the condition of the workers ; for the equal suffrage of men and women ; for the prevention of the use of the military against labour in the settlement of strikes ; for the free administration of justice ; for popu- lar government, including initiative, referendum, propor- tional representation, and the recall of oflficers by their constituents ; and for every gain or advantage for the workers that may be wrested from the capitalist system, and that may relieve the suffering and strengthen the hands of labour. We lay upon every man elected to any executive or legislative office the first duty of striving to procure whatever is for the workers' most immediate in- terest, and. for whatever will lessen the economic and political powers of the capitalist, and increase the like powers of the worker."

Translator's Introduction xxxvii

VIII

In France the question of method has been complicated by the political situation. French Reformists have been led into a particularly close union with the other Republican groups, not only because by these tactics they can further the adoption of social reforms, but also because the political situation has demanded such an alliance.

To a French political thinker of the type of Jaurès the social and political problems are closely united. He sees but two great parties, the party of the Revolution and the party of the Counter- Revolution. The Revolution, according to this special use of the word, is not a sudden upheaval that took place a hundred years ago, or is to take place a hundred years hence, but a process of de- velopment, begun by those who claimed political rights for all citizens in 1789 and continued by those who have claimed social and economic rights for them ever since. Extreme Marxists like Guesde and Vaillant do not have this sense of the unity and continuity of the liberal movement. To them a moderate liberal Republican is a natural enemy and the tool of capitalism: to Jaurès he is a natural ally and in a sense the tool of Socialism, because in giving his best effort to maintain re- publican institutions he is strengthening the foun- dation without which Socialism must remain a purely Utopian ideal.

How continuous and vigilant this effort of the

xxxviii Translator's Introduction

Republicans has to be, we in America can scarcely imagine. We see that the present French Gov- ernment is liberal and even radical in tendency, and is supported by a majority in Parliament and in the country, and we do not realise that the op- position that confronts it, and that tries by every possible means to win over the public, is not an opposition in the parliamentary sense of the word, but a revolting, a seceding fraction of the com- munity, whose aim is to overthrow the whole republican regime, re-establish monarchy, and undo the work of the Revolution.

Under these circumstances, it was natural for Reformist Socialists and other Republicans to unite in their fight against the common enemy. The Revolutionists maintain, however, that the union has been too close, that Jaurès and his friends have risked merging the party with the other groups of the Left and have lost sight of their essentially Socialistic aims. The situation reached its climax in 1899 with the entrance of the Reformist Millerand into the Waldeck-Rous- seau coalition Cabinet. The "Affaire Millerand " is particularly interesting, as it has served as a text for endless arguments on both sides, and was one of the principal issues between the two wings of the French Socialist party.

Millerand took office as Minister of Commerce and Industry in 1899, at a time when many seri- ous men thought that the existence of the Re- public was in danger. When in office he three

Translator's Introduction xxxix

times voted against the Socialist party, and as Minister was obliged to receive the Czar, the typical representative of autocracy, when he came to Paris. These acts, the Revolutionists main- tained, fully proved their contention that any alliance between Socialists and Bourgeois could only tend to weaken the position of the former; and they wished to expel Millerand from the part5\ The Reformists, while formally censuring him for his anti-Socialist votes, pointed with satisfaction to the practical reforms he instituted while in office, and argued that so much positive gain justified their theory that alliance was a valuable and necessary method of obtaining their ends.*

' See the report of the Bordeaux Congress published by the Société Nouvelle, Paris, 1904. For a German reform- ist's estimate of the case, see Von Vollmar's address deliv- ered in Dresden in February, 1901, and translated by R. C. K. Ensor in Modern Socialism. Millerand formulated and succeeded in getting passed a law limiting to ten i hours the working day in factories where men, women, and children were employed, and in the departments under his immediate control as Minister he instituted the eight-hour day. He also established certain minimum i conditions for all labour on contracts for national public works. His special effort, however, was given to the encouragement and recognition of organised labour. He ' created Labour Councils, the members of which are elected by organised workers and organised employers. These councils form permament boards of arbitration and conciliation, which may be consulted by private concerns, and must be consulted by the State, and they fix the

xl Translator's Introduction

At the time these essays were written the Socialists in France were divided into several parties, representing the extremes of theory and action, and many of Jaurès's arguments are ad- dressed more to his Socialist than to his non- Socialist opponents. Since then, however, a variety of reasons have made it possible for all factions to reunite in a single organisation. The International Congress at Amsterdam in 1904 de- voted most of its time to a discussion of the ques- tion of method and ended by passing a resolution that proclaimed the principle of class-warfare in the dogmatic Marxist manner, and was in effect a censure of the French leader. Jaurès made an eloquent and spirited defence of his policy: he de- clared that he was willing to make any reasonable concession in the interest of party unity, but main- tained that his tactics were the only practical ones. The Congress expressed a wish that the various French parties would reunite, and accord- ingly a joint-committee met during the winter to formulate a compromise agreement. In the mean- time political conditions changed. The Combes

standard rate of wages and hours for every district, and this standard is at once applicable to State contracts. They also make annual reports on the conditions of labour, causes of unemployment, enforcement of the law, etc. Millerand also introduced, but did not succeed in getting passed, a bill to regulate industrial disputes, a moderate adaptation of compulsory arbitration on the New Zealand model.

Translator's Introduction xli

ministry, that had been supported by Jaurès, fell, and the new ministry drew its support from the more moderate parties. This left the Socialists free to withdraw from the group of Parliamentary Republicans. In April, 1905, the new Socialist party organisation was completed.

These events seem at first sight like a step back- ward, but we cannot help being convinced that the triumph of the uncompromising element is only apparent. The fighting strength of the party is undoubtedly increased by union, and Jaurès is too wise a politician not to know when a partial surrender will lead to final victory. His belief in the Reformist method is of course un- shaken, but he is willing to wait and be politic, knowing that in the end his adversaries will be forced by the pressure of events to follow his plan of action. He towers above them, secure in his larger vision of history and conscious of the great part he has yet to play in the politics of his coun- try and of the world.

IX

Jaurès is probably the most conspicuous and at the same time the strongest personality in French political life at present. He is continually before the public; his activity and versatility seem un- limited. His personal organ, IJ Hiananitê^ con- tains almost daily articles signed by him, and represents his policy in every department of life : in its advanced interpretation of social legislation

xlii Translator's Introduction

and social conditions in general, in its pacific atti- tude toward foreign affairs, even in its criticism of literature, art, and the stage. Jaurès is an in- tellectuel. He graduated at the head of his class at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and has been twice Professor of Philosophy at Toulouse. Dur- ing an interval of four years in his parliamentary career he wrote a history of the French Revolu- tion that is said by some authorities to be based on a more careful study of original documents than any other history of the period. But it is as a political leader and orator that he is best known and most successful. He attends political meet- ings all over the country and wherever he goes he communicates some of his indomitable enthusiasm and splendid energy to his hearers. In the Cham- ber of Deputies he makes an incredible number of fiery and eloquent speeches, hardly ever letting an important debate pass without taking an active and usually a dramatic part, and never failing to secure breathless attention from friends and ad- versaries alike. He is equally at home denounc- ing the reactionary element and exalting the work of " Republican Solidarity," pleading the cause of sanity and justice in international afifairs and upholding the specifically Socialistic claims. A cool Anglo-Saxon might find him too excitable and emotional, might even point to instances where he seems to have allowed his eloquence to run away with his judgment, but the most unfriendly critic must grant his abihty, energy, and sincerity.

Translator's Introduction xliii

The important part played by Socialism in European politics and by Jaurès, as one of the most prominent European Socialists, seems a sufiScient excuse for the translation of these studies into English. They represent the man and the movement in the vivid and intimate setting of the daily newspaper, and their very incompleteness and informality give them a certain value as first- hand historical documents. They do not try to explain modern French Socialism to outsiders; they are a little piece of modern French Socialism, and as such I hope that Americans, whether or no they have Socialistic sympathies, will find them not without interest.

I have omitted from the original volume two short articles on French politics and rural con- ditions, parts of the essay the "Question of Method," and a number of essays dealing with the French law regulating property and inherit- ance, extremely interesting in themselves, but not applicable to countries where the Napoleonic Code is not in force. In their place I have added, as examples of quite another style, an article taken from L'Action Socialiste, and the speech delivered on the occasion of the visit of the Eng- lish parliamentary delegates to Paris; also an article published in La Petite République, but not, so far as I know, reprinted elsewhere. The or- der in which the essays appear has also been slightly altered. For all these changes I have M. Jaurès's personal authorisation.

MlI,DRED MiNTURN. Paris, December, 1905

SOCIAlvISM AND I.IFE

THE SOCIALIST AIM

The first condition of success for Socialism is that its essential characteristics should be ex- plained clearly, so that every one can understand them. There are many misunderstandings cre- ated by our adversaries, and some created by our- selves. We must do away with these.

The main idea of Socialism is simple and noble. Socialists believe that the present form of property- holding divides society into two great classes. One of these classes, the wage-earning, the pro- letariat, is obliged to pay to the other, the capi- talist, a sort of tax, in order to be able to live at all, and exercise its faculties to any degree. Here is a multitude of human beings, citizens; they possess nothing, they can live only by their work. But in order to work they need an expensive equipment which they have not got, and raw materials and capital which they have not got. Another class owns the means of production, the land, the factories, the machines, the raw ma- terials, and accumulated capital in the form of money. The first class is, then, forced to put

4 Studies in Socialism

itself into the hands of the second, and naturally this capitalist and possessing class, taking ad- vantage of its power, makes the working and non-owning class pay a large forfeit. It does not rest content after it has been reimbursed for the advances it made and has repaired the wear and tear on the machinery. It levies in addition every year and indefinitely a considerable tax on the product of the workman and farmer in the form of rent for farms, ground rent, rent of land in the cities, taxes for the payment of the public debt, industrial profit, commercial profit, and in- terest on stocks and bonds.

Therefore, in our present society, the work of the workers is not their exclusive property. And since, in our society founded on intensive produc- tion, economic activity is an essential function of every human being, since work forms an integral part of personality, the proletarian does not own his own body absolutely. The proletarian alien- ates a part of his activity, that is, a part of his being, for the profit of another class. The rights of man are incomplete and mutilated in him. He cannot perform a single act of his life without submitting to this restriction of his rights, this alienation of his very individuality. He has hardly left the factory, the mine, or the yard, where part of his effort has been expended in the creation of dividends and profits for the benefit of capital, he has hardly gone back to the poor tene- ment where his family is huddled together, when

The Socialist Aim 5

he is face to face with another tax, other dues in the shape of rent. And besides this, State taxa- tion in all its forms, direct taxation and indirect taxation, pares down his already twice-diminished wage, and this not only to provide for the legiti- mate running expenses of a civilised society and for the advantage of all its members, but to guar- antee the crushing payment of interest on the public debt for the profit of that same capitalist class, or for the maintenance of armaments at once formidable and useless. When, finally, the proletarian tries to buy, with the remnant of wages left to him after these inroads, the com- modities which are necessities of daily life, he has two courses open to him. If he lacks time or money, he will turn to a retail dealer, and will then have to bear the expense of a cumbrous and unnecessary organisation of intermediary agents; or else he may go to a great store, where over and above the direct expenses of management and dis- tribution he has to provide for the profit of ten or twelve per cent, on the capital invested. Just as the old feudal road was blocked and cut up at every step by toll-rights and dues, so, for the pro- letarian, the road of life is cut up by the feudal rights imposed upon him by capital. He can neither work nor eat, clothe nor shelter himself, without paying a sort of ransom to the owning and capitalist class.

And not only his life but his very liberty suffers by this system. If labour is to be really free, all

6 Studies in Socialism

the workers should be called upon to take part in the management of the work. They should have a share in the economic government of the shop, just as universal suffrage gives them a share in the political government of the city. Now, in the capitalist organisation of labour, the labourers play a passive rôle. They neither decide, nor do they help in deciding, what work shall be done nor in what direction available energies shall be employed. Without their consent, and often even without their knowledge, the capital which they have created undertakes or abandons this or that enterprise. They are the " hands" of the capi- talist system, only required to put into execution the schemes that capital alone has decided on. And the proletariat accomplishes these enterprises planned and willed by capital under the direction of chiefs selected by capital. So that the workers neither co-operate in determining the object of the work nor in regulating the mechanism of author- ity under which the work is performed. In other words, labour is doubly enslaved, since it is di- rected towards ends which it has not willed by means which it has not chosen. And so the same capitalist system which exploits the labour power of the workman restricts the liberty of the labourer. Thus the personality of the proletarian is lessened as well as his substance.

But this is not all. The capitalist and owning class is only a class apart when considered in re- lation to the wage earners. It is itself divided

The Socialist Aim 7

and torn by the bitterest competition. It has never been able to organise itself, and in so doing to control production and regulate it according to the variable needs of society. In this state of anarchical disorder, capital is only warned of its mistakes through crises, the terrible conseqiiences of which often fall upon the proletariat. So, by the extreme of injustice, the working classes are socially responsible for the carrying on of produc- tion which they have no share in regulating.

To have responsibility without authority, to be punished without having been even consulted, such is the paradoxical fate of the proletariat under the capitalist disorder. And if capital were organised, if by means of vast trusts it were able to regulate production, it would only regulate it for its own profit. It would abuse the power gained by union to impose usurious prices on the community of buyers, and the working class would escape from economic disorder only to fall under the yoke of monopoly.

All this misery, all this injustice and disorder result from the fact that one class monopolises the means of production and of life, and imposes its law on another class and on society as a whole. The thing to do, therefore, is to break down this supremacy of one class. The oppressed class must be enfranchised, and with it the whole of society. All diiference of class must be abol- ished by transferring to the whole body of citizens,

8 Studies in Socialism

the organised community, the ownership of the means of production and of life which to-da}', in the hands of a single class, is a power of exploitation and oppression. The universal co-operation of all citizens must be substituted for the disorderly and abusive rule of the minority. This is the only method by which the individual can be enfranch- ised. And that is why the essential aim of Social- ism, whether Collectivist or Communist, is to transform capitalist property into social property.

In the present state of humanity, where our only organisation is on the basis of nationality, social property will take the form of national property. But the action of the proletariat will assume more and more an international character. The various nations that are evolving toward Socialism will regulate their dealings with each other more and more according to the principles of justice and peace. But for a long time to come the nation as such will furnish the historical set- ting of Socialism; it will be the mould in which the new justice will be cast.

Let no one be astonished that we bring forward the idea of a national community now, whereas at first we set ourselves to establish the liberty of the individual. The nation, and the nation alone, can enfranchise all citizens. Only the nation can furnish the means of free development to all. Private associations, temporary and limited in character, can protect limited groups of individ- uals only for a time. But there is only one uni-

The Socialist Aim 9

versai association than can guarantee the rights of all individuals without exception, not only the rights of the living, but of those who are yet unborn, and who will take their places in the generations to come. Now this universal and imperishable association which includes all the individuals on a particular portion of the planet, and which extends its action and its thought to successive generations, is the nation.

If, then, we invoke the nation, we do so in order to insure the rights of the individual in the fullest and most universal sense. Not a single human being for a single moment of time should be excluded from the sphere of rights. Not one should be in danger of becoming the prey or the instrument of another individual. Not one should be deprived of the sure means of labour- ing freely without servile dependence on any other individual.

In the nation, therefore, the rights of all indi- viduals are guaranteed, to-day, to-morrow, and for ever. If we transfer what was once the prop- erty of the capitalist class to the national com- munity, we do not do this to make an idol of the nation, or to sacrifice to it the liberty of the indi- vidual. No, we do it that the nation may serve as a common basis for all individual activities. Social rights, national rights, are only the geo- metric locus of the rights of all the individuals.

Social ownership of property is merely oppor- tunity of action brought within the reach of all.

II

SOCIALISM AND LIFE

The domination of one class is an attempt to degrade humanity. Socialism, which will abolish all primacy of class and indeed all class, elevates humanity to its highest level. It is therefore a duty for all men to be Socialists.

Let no one object, as do some Socialists and Positivists, that it is useless and childish to in- voke justice, that justice is a metaphysical concep- tion, susceptible of being twisted in any direction, and that all tyrannies have fashioned a cloak for themselves from this same worn-out purple. No, in modern society the word "justice" is taking on an ever larger and more definite meaning. It has come to signify that in every man, in every individual, humanity ought to be fully respected and exalted to its complete stature. Now true humanity can only exist where there is independ- ence, active exercise of the will, free and joyous adaptation of the individual to the whole. Where men are dependent on the favour of others, where individual wills do not co-operate freely in the work of society, where the individual submits to

Socialism and Life ii

the law of the whole under compulsion or by force of habit, and not from reason alone, there human nature is degraded and mutilated. It is therefore only by the abolition of the reign of capital and the establishment of Socialism that humanity can come into the fulness of its heritage.

I am perfectly aware that the bourgeoisie man- aged to infuse an oligarchical tone and the spirit of a single class into the Declaration of the Rights of Man. I am aware that it tried to embody in that Declaration, and so consecrate for ever, the bourgeois forms of property holding, and that even in the political world it began by refusing the right of suffrage to millions of poor, who would thus have become passive citizens. But I know also that the democrats immediately made use of the theory of the Rights of Man, of all men, to demand and to conquer the right of universal suffrage. I know that they immediately based even their economic demands on that same theory. I know that the working class, although in 1789 its existence as a self-conscious class was only rudimentary, did not hesitate to apply, and to en- large, the Rights of Man in a proletarian direction. After 1792 it proclaimed that the ownership of our own lives is our greatest possession and that the right over this sovereign form of property should have precedence of all the others. Now let this word " life " be boldly expanded; let its meaning comprise not bare subsistence only, but all life, all the development of human faculties, and it will

12 Studies in Socialism

appear that Communism itself was grafted by the proletariat on to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Thus the human rights proclaimed by the Revolution instantly took on a vaster and deeper meaning than that intended by the revolutionary bourgeoisie. That class was the upholder of rights still too oligarchical and restricted to cover the whole sphere of human rights: the bed of the river was larger than the river, and a new stream, the great proletarian and human flood, had to join it before the ideal of justice could be fulfilled at last.

Socialism alone can give its true meaning to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and realise the whole idea of human justice. The justice of the revolutionary bourgeoisie has freed humanity from many personal fetters: but in forcing each new generation to pay a tax to the capital accum- ulated by the generations that have preceded it, and in leaving to the minority the privilege of collecting this tax, it has in a sense mortgaged the personality of every living human being for the benefit of the past and of a single class.

We, on the contrary, maintain that human activity in all its forms should have free access to the means of production and of wealth accumu- lated by humanity, so that humanity as a whole may gain freedom as well as riches through the efforts of the past. According to us, every mem- ber of society has henceforth a legal right to the means of development that society has created.

Socialism and Life 13

It is not then a human being in all his weakness and nakedness, that is born into the world, a prey- to every form of oppression and exploitation. It is a person with certain vested rights, who can claim for his perfect development the free use of the means of labour that have been accumulated by human effort.

Every human being has the right to his full physical and moral growth. He has then the right to exact from humanity everything needed to supplement his own effort. He has the right to work, to produce, and to create, and no cate- gory of mankind should be able to exact usury from the fruit of his work, and bring it under their yoke. And as the community can only en- sure the rights of the individual by putting the means of production at his disposal, the com- munity itself must have the sovereign right of ownership over all the means of production.

Marx and Engels have given in the Comviunist Manifesto a splendid instance of that respect for all life which is the very essence of Communism. " In bourgeois society living labour is only a means of adding to labour which has been ac- cumulated in the form of capital. In Communist society the accumulated labour of the past will be only a means of enlarging, enriching, and stimulating the life of the labourers.

" In bourgeois society the past dominates the present. In the Communist society, the present will dominate the past."

14 Studies in Socialism

The Declaration of the Rights of Man had also been an afiSrmation of the dignity of life, a call to life. The Revolution proclaimed the rights of the living man. It did not recognise the right of a humanity that was past and gone to bind the humanity that was present and active. It did not recognise in the past services of kings and nobles the right to bear heavily on the present living humanity, depriving it of its full freedom of action. On the contrary, the living humanity seized hold of and appropriated to its own use all that was vital and strong in the legacy of the past.

The unity of France, which had been the work of royalty, became the decisive instrument of revo- lution against royalty itself. In the same way the great forces of production amassed by the bour- geoisie will become the decisive instrument of human liberation from the power of privileged capital.

Life does not destroy the past, it subdues it to its own ends. The Revolution is not a rupture, it is a conquest. And when the proletariat has conquered, and Communism has been instituted, all the stored-up human effort of centuries will become a sort of supplementary nature, rich and beneficent, which will welcome all human beings from the hour of their birth, and assure to them their full and perfect development.

The roots of Communism strike far back, then, even to the bourgeois conception of justice, to the

Socialism and Life 15

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the right to life. But this internal logic of the idea of right and humanity would have remained dormant and powerless without the external vigorous action of the proletariat. The proletariat intervened from the very first days of the Revolution. It did not listen to the absurd advice of those who, like Marat, animated by the spirit of class, said : " What are you doing? Why are you going to seize the Bastille, whose walls never imprisoned a working man ?" It marched to the attack, de- termined the success of great victories, rushed to the frontier, saved the Revolution at home and abroad, became an indispensable power, and gathered as it went the fruits of its incessant activity. In three years, from 1789 to 1792, it transformed a semi-democratic and semi- middle- class system to a pure democracy in which prole- tarian action was sometimes even the dominant factor. Having shown the strength of which it was capable it gained self-confidence, and ended by telling itself, with Babeuf, that the new power it had created, the national power that was the common possession of all, ought to be made the instrument by whose means happiness for all could be established.

Thus, by the action of the proletariat, Com- munism ceased to be a vague philosophic specu- lation and became a party, a living force. Thus, Socialism arose from the French Revolution under the combined action of two forces, the force of the

i6 Studies in Socialism

idea of right, and the force of the new-born activity of the proletariat. It is therefore no longer a Utopian abstraction. It gushes forth from the most turbulent and effervescent of the hot springs of modern life.

But now, after many tests, half- victories, and re- pulses, through the diversities of various political regimes^ the new middle-class order developed. Now, under the Empire and the Restoration, the economic system of the bourgeoisie based on un- limited competition began to bear its fruit: un- doubted increase of wealth, but with it immorality, trickery, perpetual warfare, disorder, and oppres- sion. Fourier's stroke of genius was to conceive that it was possible to remedy the confusion, to purge the social system without hampering the production of wealth, but on the contrary increas- ing it. His was no ascetic ideal. He wished for free play for all faculties and all instincts. The same association that would abolish crises would multiply riches by regulating and combining all efforts. Thus the slight cloud of asceticism that may have overshadowed Socialism was dispelled. Thus, Socialism, having taken part with the pro- letarians of the Revolution and with Babeuf in all the revolutionary life, came finally into the great current of modern wealth and production. As represented by Fourier and Saint-Simon it appears at last as a power able not only to overcome capi- talism, but to surpass it in its own field.

In the new order foreseen by these great

Socialism and Life 17

geniuses, justice will not be obtained at the price of the joys of life. On the contrary, the just organisation of the forces at the disposition of humanity will add to their productive power. The splendour of wealth will be a manifestation of the triumph of right, and happiness will be the halo of justice. Babeufism was not the negation of the Revolution but, on the contrary, its hardiest pulsation. So Fourierism and Saint-Simonism are not the negation or the restriction of modern life, but its passionate fulfilment. Everywhere, then. Socialism is a vital force moving in the direction of life itself and in its fiercest current.

But the reply of the bourgeoisie under Louis Philippe to the great visions of harmony and wealth for all, the vast constructive conception of Fourier and Saint-Simon, was a redoubled fury of class exploitation by the exhausting intensive use made of the labour element in production, and an orgy of State concessions, monopolies, dividends, and premiums. It would have been naïve, to say the least, to continue to oppose idyllic dreams to this shameless exploitation. The retort of Proudhon was a biting criticism of property, interest, rent of farms, and profit: and here again the word which ought to have been spoken was uttered under the very dictation, the sharp inspiration, of life itself.

But how was the work of criticism to be com- pleted by the work of organisation ? How were all the social elements that were threatened or

i8 Studies in Socialism

oppressed by the power of capital, the banks, and industrial monopolies to be united in one fighting whole? Proudhon quickly discovered that the army of social democracy was composed of very various elements, that it was a mixture of factory- workers, still weak in numbers and power, of a lower middle-class composed of petty manufac- turers and small tradespeople, and of an artisan class which the absorbing power of capital was eying greedily but had not yet done away with.

From this analysis comes all that is hazy and contradictory in the positive constructive part of Proudhon' s work, that singular mixture of reac- tion and revolution which makes him endeavour on the one hand to save the credit of the lower middle-class by means of artificial combinations, and on the other urge the creation of a solid working class, the revolutionary power. He seems to have wished to suspend the action of events and to put ofi^ the revolutionary crisis of 1848, in order to give economic evolution time to draw its line of action more clearly, and better to direct the minds of men. But here again, in these hesitations, these scruples, even in the con- tradictory nature of these efibrts, we can trace the influence of the intimate contact of sincere Social- ist thought with the complex and still uncertain reality. It is the very life of modern times that again and again finds its echo here.

And now at last, after 1848, the prime efiective force back of the whole movement has become

Socialism and Life 19

organised, now every one can understand and realise it. Now the growth of modern industry- has brought forth a working proletariat increas- ingly numerous, coherent, and self-conscious. Those who with Marx hailed the advent of this decisive power, those who have understood that the world was to be transformed by its means, have perhaps shown a tendency to exaggerate the rapidity of economic evolution. L^ess prudent than Proudhon, and not allowing as he did for the power of resistance and resources of self-trans- formation in the class of small producers, they have perhaps over-simplified the problem and mag- nified the absorbing faculty of concentrated capital.

But even after we have made all the reservations and restrictions which result from the study of the complicated and many-sided reality, the truth re- mains that the proletariat is increasing in num- bers, that it represents an ever-growing fraction of human societies, and that it is gathered to- gether in always vaster centres of production; the truth remains that wholesale production has made this proletariat ready to conceive of wholesale ownership of property, which, carried to its logical conclusion, is social ownership of property.

Thus Socialism, which in Babeuf may be called the most acute manifestation of the democratic Revolution; which in Fourier and Saint-Simon was the most splendid enlargement of the bold promises of wealth and power poured forth by capital; which in Proudhon was the sharpest

20 Studies in Socialism

warning given to the societies in process of ex- tinction by the encroachments of bourgeois oli- garchy,— Socialism is now in the proletariat and by its means the strongest of all the social forces, the one that is continually growing, and that will end by overturning the equilibrium of society for its own advantage, that is for the advantage of hu- manity, of which it is now the highest expression.

No, Socialism is not an academic and Utopian conception, it is ripening and developing in closest touch with reality. It is a great vital force, min- gled with all phases of life, and will soon be able to take command of the life of society. To the incomplete application of justice and human rights made by the democratic bourgeois Revolution, it has opposed a full and decisive interpretation of the Rights of Man. To the incomplete, narrow, and chaotic organisation of wealth attempted by capital, it has opposed a magnificent conception of harmonised wealth, where the effort of each would be supplemented by the co-ordinated effort of all. To the hard pride and selfishness of the middle class, narrowed by its legalised exploita- tion and monopoly, it has opposed a revolutiçn- ary bitterness, an irritating and vengeful irony; a deadly implacable analysis that dispels lies and sophistries. And finally, to the social supremacy of capital it has opposed the class organisation of the ever-growing and strengthening proletariat.

How can the regime of class persist when the oppressed and exploited class grows daily in

Socialism and Life 21

numbers, in cohesion, and in self-consciousness, and when it has determined with daily increasing firmness to have done for ever with class owner- ship of property ?

Now at the same time that the real substantial forces back of Socialism are growing and develop- ing, the technical means of turning Socialism from a theory to a practical fact are also defining themselves. If we look at the national organisa- tion we see that it is constantly becoming more unified, and more clearly sovereign, and that it has been forced to take on more and more eco- nomic functions, which we must hail as a sort of rude prelude to the social property of the future. In the great urban and industrial centres we see that the questions of hygiene, housing, lighting, education, and food are bringing the democracy into ever closer touch with the whole problem of property and into the administration of that part of property which is already collective. Most im- portant again is the growing co-operative move- ment, including as it does co-operatives for both production and distribution. And finally, we have the labour and professional organisations, that are growing, changing, and becoming more complicated and elastic all the time: trade-unions, federations of unions, central trade committees, federations of trades, and federations of labour.

We have, then, reached a point where it can be safely asserted that the substitute for the privileges of capital is not to be the depressing monotony

22 Studies in Socialism

of a centralised bureaucracy. No, the nation, in which is vested the sovereign social right of property, will have numberless agents — local gov- ernment units, co-operative societies, and trade- unions — which will give the freest and supplest movement to social property, in harmony with the mobility and variety of individual forces. There is then a practical technical preparation for Socialism just as there is an intellectual and social preparation. They are children who, carried away by the magnitude of the work already ac- complished, think that all that is now necessary is a decree, a Fiat hix, of the proletariat to make the Socialist world rise up forthwith. But on the other hand they are senseless who do not see the irresistible power of evolution which condemns the unjust ascendency of the middle class and the whole class system to extinction.

It will be the intellectual shame of the Radical party not to have answered the great problem that weighs on us all in any other way than by enun- ciating the equivocal electioneering formula, " Maintenance of private property." The formula will undoubtedly serve for some time longer to rouse ignorance, terror, and selfishness in opposi- tion to Socialism. But it will kill the party that is driven to make use of it.

Either it signifies nothing, or it is the expres- sion of the narrowest social conservatism. It cannot long hold out either against science or against democracy.

Ill

THE RADICALS AND PRIVATE PROPERTY

Democracy, under the impetus given it by organised labour, is evolving irresistibly toward Socialism, toward a form of property which will deliver man from his exploitation by man, and bring to an end the régime of class government. The Radicals flatter themselves that they can put a stop to this movement by promising the work- ing classes some reforms and by proclaiming themselves the guardians of private property. They hope to hold a large part of the proletariat in check by a few reforming laws expressing a sentiment of social solidarity, and by their policy of defending private property to rouse the con- servative forces, the petty bourgeoisie, the mid- dle-classes, and the small peasant-proprietors, to oppose Socialism.

In the first place, to subscribe to such formulas as these means a real intellectual falling off for a part of the democracy. How can men as culti- vated as M. Léon Bourgeois and M. Camille Pelletan find any sense in the declaration of the 23

24 Studies in Socialism

Radical party that afi5rms " the maintenance of private property"? Used in this general and abstract fashion the phrase "private property" has no meaning whatever.

In the course of human evolution private prop- erty has many times changed its form and its substance, its meaning and its scope.

In the societies that preceded ours private property embodied itself in forms of oppression which have been definitely abolished once for all. Slavery was one of the forms of private property. In Athens and Rome there were public slaves, slaves of the city or the state; but most of the slaves were simply a part of the patrimony of the citizens. The property in slaves was part of private property. The slaves either cultivated the lands of their Greek or Roman master or they laboured for his profit in the city workshops. Individuals owned them, disposed of them, forced them to labour, gave them away as presents, sold them, or left them to their heirs. And in the same way, when, after the collapse of the ancient society and the Roman regime founded on con- quest, slavery was ameliorated and became serf- dom, the serfs, too, bound to the land, were objects of certain private property rights. Under the Merovingian and Carlovingian kings there were royal slaves attached to the royal lands, and Church slaves attached to the Church lands, but the immense majority of the serfs belonged to lords who were in the end practically great landed

Radicals and Private Property 25

proprietors with a personal property right in their possessions.

During the Middle Ages, from the tenth to the fourteenth century, serfdom was really established as one of the forms of what we call to-day private property. It was the lord who disposed of the labour of the serf. Agricultural serfs, thinly scat- tered over the great rural domains, and industrial serfs, bakers, smiths, goldsmiths, spinners, and weavers, gathered together in the outbuildings of the seignorial mansion, all these were under the domination of an individual; they were included in his property and sold by him with the estate. They were, like the land itself, like the fields, the vineyards, the cattle, one of the objects upon which the right of private property was exercised.

I understand, of course, that slavery and serf- dom have been eliminated from private property. But can the Radicals be certain that every element of servitude, oppression, and injustice has also disappeared ? And what right have they to use the phrase " private property " in a general and abstract fashion when the elemental meaning of the words varies with the very advance of his- tory? Formulas like these are the negation of historic evolution. They condemn the party who adopts them to see nothing and to understand nothing. They put it outside the pale of science and of vital action.

Just as in ancient times private property ad-

26 Studies in Socialism

mitted slavery and as in the Middle Ages it was compatible with serfdom, so to-day it allows the wages system. I am far from wishing to divert myself with the melancholy reactionary paradox of those Socialists who say that the slave and the serf were happier than the wage earner. The moral and material position of the modern work- man is as a whole superior to that of the slave or the serf. We are not talking about that. I simply maintain that to-day private property is embodied in the capitalist form which permits a minority of privileged individuals to dispose of the work, the strength, and the health of the working classes, and to levy on them a perpetual tribute. And I maintain that when the Radicals declare in a summary fashion that they wish to uphold private property, either the declaration has no meaning at all, or it means that they want to uphold capitalistic property.

Whoever, in Greece or Rome, had simply an- nounced that he wished to maintain private property, would have announced himself an up- holder of slavery. Whoever, during the Middle Ages, had simply announced that he wished to maintain private or personal property, would have upheld at the same time serfdom and feudalism. And to-day, when the Radicals, in a generalised formula, announce to the world that they wish to maintain private property against our attacks upon it, they constitute themselves from that moment the guardians of capitalist property.

Radicals and Private Property 27

But how empty of true significance all these abstract formulas are ! They do not merely re- strict our conception of the evolution of private property when the thing itself is constantly changing; they also simplify it arbitrarily. For from age to age private property not only changes its meaning but also varies immensely in the mat- ter of greater or less complexity. Sometimes it is applied to social relations that are extremely com- plex; again it seems to become more simplified. There are periods when human progress necessi- tates a complex notion of property; there are periods when it necessitates a simple one.

When slavery was changed to serfdom, property became more complex. The relations between master and slave were of a brutal simplicity. Then, in the Middle Ages, when the serf had a family and a patrimony, the master could not dispose of him so simply. The private property rights of the master in the serf are harder to de- fine, less simple than the rights of the master in the slave. Human personality, which may be said to have been often non-existent in the slave and which was more evident in the serf, complicated the property relation; it introduced varied and uncertain elements into the conception of private property. And in this case, complexity certainly marks a step in advance. On the other hand, at the end of the eighteenth century, when the mo- ment came for the middle classes and the peasants

28 Studies in Socialism

to give the death-blow to the feudal system, the Revolution tended to simplify and not to compli- cate property relations. It freed industrial prop- erty from the binding complications of the guild system. It freed agricultural property from the enormous entanglement of feudal and ecclesiasti- cal dues. The bourgeois and the peasant were more distinctly, more absolutely owners, than they were under the feudal regime ; and at that time, during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the apparent simplification of property was a sign of human progress, just as, twelve centuries before, the complication of property had been a sign of human progress.

I read with absorbing interest the excellent work recently published by Giard and Brière, in which M. Henri See traces the history of the rural classes and the regime of the great landed estates in France in the Middle Ages. He brings out forcibly the changing complexity and perpetual transformation of property.

" It also appears to be certain," he says in his conclusion, " that in mediaeval times men had a conception of property distinctly different from the one with which we are familiar. We see, at one and the same time, rights over the land exer- cised by the overlord, the vassal, and the tenant. The peasant who inherits his rights of tenure may be in a certain sense considered as a pro- prietor; if the rights of the lord were removed, the laud he cultivates would belong to him with-

Radicals and Private Property 29

out restriction. The rights of user, exercised col- lectively by the inhabitants of any given estate, might be regarded in some respects as property. That is to say that property, in the Middle Ages, had a much more complex character, much less abstract and clearly defined than in our day. Far from being immovable, the conception of property has been modified in the course of the coiturieSy and there is no doubt that it will be further modified in the future, that it will follow economic and social phenomejia i?i their evolution.''''

There is the broad and far-reaching conclusion to which the French historians are more and more tending. What force can the scholastic and child- ish formula of the Radicals have when confronted with the sovereign findings of history and this living evolution of the conception of property ? Just as it has been modified in the past the con- ception of property will be modified again; and it is certain that it is now going to evolve in the direction of greater complication, of richer com- plexity. A new force has to be reckoned with, a force which is going to complicate and transform all social relations, the whole property system. This new force is the human individual.

For the first time since the beginning of history, man claims his rights as a man, all his rights. The workman, the proletarian, the man who owns nothing, is affirming his own individuality. He claims everything that belongs properly to a man, the right to life, the right to work, the right to

30 Studies in Socialism

the complex development of his faculties, to the continuous exercise of his free-will and of his reason. Under the double action of democratic life which has wakened or strengthened in him the pride of a man, and of modern industry which has given to united labour a consciousness of its power, the workman is becoming a person, and insists upon being treated as such, everywhere and always. Well , society cannot guarantee him the right to work or the right to life, it cannot promote him from the condition of a passive wage earner to that of a free co-operator, without itself entering into the domain of property. Social property has to be created to guarantee private property in its real sense, that is, the property that the human individual has and ought to have in his own person.

Thus a social property right comes into being, for the benefit of the workers, and this right is extended to the many associations, local govern- ment units {comi?iunes), trade-unions, and co- operative societies, which, being in close touch with the individual, are able to protect his rights and guarantee his newly-won freedom of action more effectively and with greater suppleness than the nation could. In place, then, of the relatively simple and brutal capitalistic form of property, will be substituted an infinitely complex form, where the social right of the nation will serve as guaranty, by the intermediary of many local or

Radicals and Private Property 31

professional groups, to the essential rights of every human being, the free play of all activities. Every capitalistic element will have disappeared ; no man will be able to make use of another man to create dividends for himself, or profit, or an in- come, or rent.

But the new property in its vast complexity, national, communal, corporate, co-operative, will be, at the same time, individual; because no in- dividual will be handed over to the tyranny of another individual or the tyranny of a group or of the nation; and the rights of each man will be guaranteed by contracts at once supple and pre- cise, which, until common property is established, will represent private property in its final purged form.

So will be verified the conclusion of the his- torian, that our conception o'f property is to undergo still further modifications. And in this sense there is not a single searcher after truth, not a single scholar who is not working to prove the puerility of the Radical formula. In M. See's volume I read the long list of men of science, his- torians, workers in the archives and in the ancient charters, who have either gathered together or ar- ranged or interpreted the documents he has used. And undoubtedly, among those men, there must be many who belong, or who think they belong, to the Conservative party, some even to the party of reaction. But all, no matter what their per- sonal theories are, no matter what faith they hold,

32 Studies in Socialism

all are serving the cause of evolution, in other words, at the present moment, the cause of Social- ism; because they do not stop at the surface of history but penetrate to the depths, and because they reveal to mankind the eternal motion that is continually breaking up and remoulding property according to new forms and new laws. And it is impossible that these studies of the great scholars should not penetrate gradually, through inter- mediaries, even to the middle-class youth.

So when the Radicals, hoping to put a stop to, or at least impede, the movement of working-class emancipation, speak of the thing that they, in their scholastic jargon, C2M private property^ they will find themselves the object on the one hand of the anger of the labour democracy which will justly take them to task for defending the form of capitalist property under cover of an ambiguous phrase, and on the other of the disdain of science, which will contrast the reality of historic evolu- tion with their abstract and petrified conception of property.

The time is not far off when no one will be able to speak to the public about the preservation of private property without covering himself with ridicule and putting himself voluntarily into an inferior rank. That which reigns to-day under the name of private property is really class property, and those who wish for the establish- ment of democracy in the economic as well as the

Radicals and Private Property 33

political world should give their best effort to the abolition and not to the maintenance of this class property.

But let the Radicals note this fact. If their so- cial formula, "maintenance of private property," has become void and meaningless, this result has not been brought about by the example of the past only, or even by the irresistible tendency of new forces to break the capitalistic mould. In bourgeois society itself, in the bourgeois code,' private property appears in such an incomplete form, is so hampered, restricted, and broken up, that even now and from the point of view of the bourgeoisie itself, one must grant that it is either childishness or an anachronism to speak about " the maintenance of private property."

And we Socialists, when we undertake to break up or gradually absorb capitalist property, will often find that we can direct the social movement toward the collectivist form by simply developing certain practices of bourgeois society, interpreting generously certain articles of its code, and hasten- ing the forward march of our legislation in the paths along which it has already begun to move. But those who constitute themselves the guardians oi private property not only deny the society of the future; they misunderstand the society of the present.

' The " Code Napoléon." 3

IV

ROUGH OUTLINES

The proletariat has reached the point where it knows exactly what road it should follow in the immense social transformation that is coming. It recognises now distinctly enough the chief aspects of the new fégime that it wishes and ought to institute. It knows that the power of organised labour will be substituted for the power of capital, that all tribute to capital from labour will be abolished, and that the disorder of capital- ist and mercantile production will give place to an order of production regulated by science itself ac- cording to the needs of every one. The proletariat knows that it is necessary, in order that the organisation of freed and sovereign labour may become possible, for the collective body — the community — to substitute its right for the exist- ing right of private property. It is clear that just as long as individuals and classes control the means of production so long will the authority over a large number of individuals be retained and exploited by the few. The intervention of the community itself in regard to property is 34

Rough Outlines 35

necessary in order that the rights of all individuals may be respected. From this truth comes the grand coUectivist or communist idea of social property which is the leading light of the Socialist proletariat in its many-sided and laborious effort.

But this general idea, however clear and well defined it be, is not sufficient to decide the method to be employed or the innumerable combinations by means of which Socialism will be instituted. It is certain that the direction of economic evo- lution will itself determine the infinitely complex relations according to which the new society will be organised. A few general formulae will not suffice to transform society. It will be necessary to observe constantly the trend of affairs, to grasp the points at which the society of to-day touches the new idea. Our effort would be sterile and our action would hinder the march of events instead of aiding it, if we did not determine the direction which facts, minds, inclinations, and customs are taking.

I come back to the same concrete example. I have shown the blind evolution that is taking place in the holdings of the peasantry, a change unconscious and hidden, by which, if I may say so, the spirit of ownership is being renewed. There is a period of almost a month and a half during the year, a particularly active period too, when the peasant proprietors associate themselves in groups over quite an extended area and work with one another and for one another. Hardly

36 Studies in Socialism

has the harvesting-machine (which has not every- where the adjunct of a binding-machine) laid down the grain in small parcels on the fertile earth, before the neighbouring proprietors rush to help in tying the grain into sheaves, forming bundles of the sheaves, loading these bundles into great carts, and building the stacks. Between the métayers and the small peasant proprietors, the same exchange of service takes place, and there is not merely a mutual lending of manual labour but of work animals also.

When the harvesting machine has cut down the grain, it is necessary, for fear of storms, to tie it up quickly and to heap it in stacks. In order to hasten this urgent work the peasants lend each other carts and oxen, and, I repeat it, there is no account kept. It would be impossible to value the services of one as against those of another. It is a free and friendly exchange. Thus, a little bit of the communist soul penetrates into the peasant labour and into the peasant conscience, and this lasts until the threshing-machine has done away with the last stack of the row into which the groups have spontaneously formed themselves.

The Socialists indeed have never expected to force peasant property into communistic form. Our predecessors and our leaders have always said that the example of agricultural production on a great scale would suffice to make the peasant proprietors abandon small field cultivation and

Rough Outlines ^7

divided properties. But even this statement of the case is inaccurate and represents the evolution of rural life in too drj^, too mechanical a manner. It is not merely that, by no stroke of authority, nor even by attraction, the peasant property will enter into the communistic movement. It will do this, in part at least, by its own internal evolution.

One of the essential tasks of Socialism will be to give to the peasant proprietors a lively sense and a true understanding of the change that is obscurely taking place among them. When one makes them notice it they are astonished for a moment, then they recognise the extent of the change that is coming about little by little in their habits and thoughts. It is in prolonging and systematising these new tendencies that Socialism will come into contact with life and will borrow its strength. This co-operation, still superficial and limited, will have to be extended and organ- ised and made adaptable. It would be necessary in many regions to inaugurate great works for the perfecting of agricultural processes: ditches must be dug, marshes drained, hills flattened, fertiliser carted, earth must be added and irriga- tion managed. It is possible that the nation will be called upon to encourage and subsidise these works, for it is irrational that there should be public works of communication and not public works of production. However, it is very clear

38 Studies in Socialism

that the active and intelligent collaboration of the producers themselves will be necessary. More- over, this collaboration is beginning to seem possible since communistic habits have got a foothold in the peasant labour.

I could cite many characteristics, slight indeed but which outline the future forms which life will take. I spoke of the vineyards around Gaillac. There, for several years, since the simple agri- cultural wage earners have regained the hope of acquiring some small share of the reconstituted vineyards, they have little by little established a curious custom. The working day, which com- mences it is true at a very early hour, almost at daybreak, ends at four o'clock in the afternoon. The reason is that it is necessary for many of these proletarians, of these wage earners who possess a small vineyard and who wdsh to work in it after their day's labour at the bourgeois pro- prietor's, to be free at four o'clock. Thus, these men are accustomed to two kinds of work, to the collective work which they perform on a great estate in company with numerous wage earners, and to the individual labour that they perform on their own minute property. I hardly need say that the work they do for themselves is, even after the fatigue of the paid labour, a pleasure and a joy. But I am convinced that this duality of soul will continue in them after the great social transformation. I suppose that the great vine- yards will become the property of the commune.

Rough Outlines 39

I suppose that the workers who yesterday were the paid labourers of the noble or bourgeois pro- prietors will be formed into an association and will receive from the commune the large estates to exploit. It is evident that they will be in a much happier situation than that in which they find themselves to-day. Whatever part of the product is retained by the commune and by the nation for the benefit of large undertakings of use to society as a whole, the remuneration of the associated workers will be larger than now, as it will no longer be subject to the deductions of the pro- prietor. And the workers will have the guaran- ties which they lack to-day. Without being proprietors in the strict and narrow sense of the term, they will not be salaried workers. They will choose their employers; they will take part in the management of undertakings; they will have a definite right by reason of the contracts; they will be protected by the higher forms of the contracts which in the Communist society will guarantee all individual rights, even against arbi- trary action of the association of which they will form a part. They will then be attached to the great vineyards cultivated by their hands, by a bond more living and strong, by a sensation more joyous and more full than the wage earner of to- day enjoys. And nevertheless it is extremely probable that they would feel a vital loss if they should no longer find, in seeing the grapes grow golden on certain vines which were theirs, no one's

40 Studies in Socialism

but theirs, that keen joy which has more intimacy than egotism in it. And why should a com- munist society, skilful in cultivating all varieties of joys, abolish this one ? Let our conscious effort direct more and more the vast social movement towards the Communism to which it already so strongly inclines, but once started in this direc- tion the varied forces of life will themselves freely and finally determine their own advance and equilibrium.

REVOI.UTIONARY EVOIyUTION

41

V

AFTER FIFTY YEARS

Whkn the revolution of 1848 had been crushed everywhere, in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Austria, and in Hungary, when the proletariat had been beaten by the bourgeoisie and the liberal bourgeoisie by the reaction, the Communist and working-class party, having lost the liberty of the press and the right to hold meetings, in other words all the legal means of gaining its ends, was forced to enter on subterranean methods and to organise itself in secret societies.

In this way a German Communist society was organised, whose central committee, in 1850, sat at London. Naturally, in these obscure and en- thusiastic little societies, embittered as they were by defeat, hot for revenge, and unbalanced by the very absence of the stead3àng contact of ordinary life, puerile plans of conspiracy were abundant. Defeat, however, had not deprived Marx, who was a member of the central committee, of his lucidity and his large view of life in its complications and its evolution. He opposed childish plans and calmed ebullitions of excitement. But the day 43

44 Studies in Socialism

came when he had to break away. On the 15th of September, 1850, he resigned from the central committee of London. He insisted upon justify- ing this act of schism by a written declaration, inserted in the report of the committee, which ran as follows:

"The majority [z. e., his opponents] has sub- stituted the dogmatic spirit for the critical, the idealistic interpretation of events for the material- istic. Simple will-power, instead of the true re- lations of things, has become the motive force of revolution. While we say to the working people: ' You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and wars between nations not only to change existing conditions but to change yourselves and make yourselves worthy of political power,' you, on the contrary, say, ' We ought to get power at once, or else give up the fight.' While we draw the attention of the Ger- man workman to the undeveloped state of the proletariat in Germany, you flatter the national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the grossest manner, a method of pro- cedure without doubt the more popular of the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetish of the words ' the people,' so you make one of the word ' proletariat.' Like them, you substitute revolu- tionary phrases for revolutionary evolution."

I repeat it: it is Marx who is speaking. Fifty years! the time that Marx gave the workmen, not indeed to install Communism, but to make

After Fifty Years 45

themselves fit for political power, have just elapsed. What civil and international wars did Marx have in mind in 1850 ? What trials did he think the proletariat and Europe itself would have to pass through in order that the working class should reach its full political maturity ?

Undoubtedly he included the struggle of West- ern Europe with Russia among the necessary ex- ternal wars, Russia had just played the part of the great instrument of reaction in Europe, and it seemed to Marx that while the Imperial autocracy remained unbroken any revolution in Western Europe would be impossible. So when the Crimean war broke out he hailed it with re- joicing; in his letters on the Eastern Question he rails at and urges forward the Liberal Ministry in England, who were, according to him, too slow in beginning the fight. Russia was not crushed, and the European Social Revolution did not break out as a result of the Crimean war, as Marx, overtaken himself by that fever of impatience and illusion which in 1850 he had objected to in his colleagues of the London committee, had for a moment hoped. Nevertheless the Crimean war did shake the old system in Russia. In that direction the formidable obstacle that Marx feared is at least diminished if not destroyed. I think it extremely doubtful whether Russia could now interfere successfully as she did in 1848 and 1849 to crush a revolutionary movement, even if a Socialist revolution were to break out in all

46 Studies in Socialism

Western Europe, if the proletariat were for a moment master of the situation in Paris, Vienna, Rome, Berlin, and Brussels, as the democracy had been in 1848. I do not know whether the union of the Russian students and the Russian Socialist workmen will be strong enough to force a liberal constitution on the Imperial autocracy for a long time to come. But the autocracy, an- noyed by all sorts of internal opposition and un- doubtedly preoccupied in strengthening itself within, could not bring to bear on Europe the power that it had at its command a half-century ago.

At all events everything that the Russian autocracy wished to prevent in 1848 has been accomplished, or very nearly so. Russia wished to keep Italy divided, subjugated under the 3'oke of the foreigner; she has freed herself from Aus- tria and from the Papacy, And the working class is becoming one of the principal vital forces in the restored nation. Russia wished to prevent the establishment of the democracy in France, even under the Napoleonic form. Well, it is a republican democrac}^ that is firmly planted in France, and that is henceforth invincible. The political and economic action of the organised working class there grows slowly but surely. In Belgium, the constitution inclines more and more toward democracy, and the proletariat almost grasps universal suffrage. In German^', by one of those extraordinary ironical turns of history

After Fifty Years 47

that bear witness to the invincible power of the democracy, we may say that Russia was un- wittingly the instrument that helped forward universal suffrage and Socialism itself. Because Bismarck united Germany for the advantage of monarchical and absolutist Prussia , Russia twice seconded the designs of Bismarck by a com- plaisant neutrality, once in 1866 against Austria, once in 1870 against France. Well, after all, Bismarck could only bind the different German States together by the tie of universal suffrage; he was forced to make it the golden ring of the new Empire. Moreover, the working class in Germany, which could not become fully conscious of its unity, and therefore of its existence as a class, in a divided and broken-up Germany, has developed its great political activity over the vast area of a united Germany.

To sum up, the way democracy has grown in Western European States has defeated and still defeats all attempts at violent intervention by the powers of oppression. It is not by any sudden explosion that democracy takes possession of States, and Socialism takes possession of the de- mocracy. The laws by which, from i860 to 1885, England has obtained an almost universal suffrage are as far-reaching in their effect as revolutions, and yet no one except persons of a certain learn- ing knows the exact date at which they were passed. It is like the silent budding of the trees in spring. The new rôle of the working class

4^ Studies in Socialism

and the peasantry in the national and govern- mental life of Italy is also the peaceful equivalent of a revolution; it is another risorgime7ito . And the same is true of the many-sided growth of the French proletariat. Tsarism can harass and weaken all these movements. It can envelop governments by its diplomacy at once subtle and weighty, but it cannot check the irresistible tend- ency of nations toward complete democracy, and the irresistible growth of the working class within the democracies.

Thus the obstacle which, according to Marx, had to be done away with before the working class in Europe could be capable of assuming real political power, although not destroyed, has been either reduced or evaded. It has been reduced by the Crimean war, that forced Russian autocracy to be passive during many years, and that made the resurrection of the Italian nation possible four years after, in 1859. It has been evaded by the subtlety of history which disarmed Russia's mistrust — by introducing German democracy under the auspices of Prussian absolutism. The very ground on which it stands is mined by the growing power of the working class and Russian liberalism. Finally, it is evaded and reduced to naught by the continuity of democratic and So- cialistic growth that is affirming itself everywhere in Europe without the crisis of war.

What other civil or foreign wars did Marx have in mind ? Doubtless he was thinking of the

After Fifty Years 49

wars that were to free Italy, and to unify Ger- many, which the weak Liberal bourgeoisie of the Frankfort Parliament had been unable to unite by the bonds of liberty.' Perhaps, too, he had adopted the idea of Engels, who, travelling in France after the days of June, 1848, wrote in his journal that Socialism would only triumph in France by means of a civil war of wage-earners against peasants. Happily this is not true. The Commune of 187 1 was a heroic struggle of the republican and partly Socialistic workmen of Paris against the country people. But these country people were not the small peasant pro- prietors: they were the country squires, come out from their small country houses for the occasion. The democracy of small proprietors not only ac- cepted the Republic but acclaimed it from the beginning. It did not take part in the battle against it. There is no bad feeling between the Socialist workman and the peasant. There will not be any. And we must see to it that no mis- understandings arise in the future, so that the rural democracy may come over gradually to Socialism as it has come over to the Republic.

At all events, the primary condition of working- class political action has been fulfilled in the fifty years that have passed; it has been effected by the trials of great civil or foreign wars, and still more by the slow and continuous pressure of

' The Frankfort Congress was held after the Revolution of 1848. 4

50 Studies in Socialism

events, by that magnificent revolutionary evolution that Marx heralded. This primary condition was the formation in all Europe of great autonomous nations, freed from Russian oppression and having attained or tending energetically toward the at- tainment of democracy and universal suffrage.

Now that that condition has been fulfilled, the working class in Kurope, especially the working class in France, is in possession of the ' ' tools and the workshop." It is no slight task to bring the proletariat from that point to the final completion of the work. To-day, as much as fifty years ago, we must guard against the revolutionary phrase and set ourselves to understand the deep meaning of ^'evolutionary evolution in the new era.

VI

REVOIvUTIONARY MAJORITIES

Thosk great social changes that are called revolutions cannot, or rather can no longer, be accomplished by a minority. A revolutionary minority, no matter how intelligent and energetic, is not enough, in modern societies at least, to bring about a revolution. The co-operation and adhesion of a majority, and an immense majority, is needed.

It is possible — and history has here a dij05cult problem to solve — that there have been periods and lands where the human multitude has been so passive and so unstable in character that it has been moulded by the will of certain strong indi- viduals or small groups. But since the consti- tution of modern nations, since the Reformation and the Renaissance, there is hardly a single in- dividual who is not a distinct force. There is hardly a single individual who has not got his own personal interests, his ties that bind him to the present, his ideas about the future, his pas- sions and his thoughts. In modern Europe, then, for several centuries, every human being has been 51

52 Studies in Socialism

•

a centre of energy, of conscience, and of action. And since, in periods of transformation, when old social ties are in process of dissolution, all human energies are of equivalent force, the law of the majority is necessarily decisive. A society takes on a new form only when the immense majority of the individuals who compose it demand or ac- cept a great change.

This is self-evident in the case of the Revolution of 1789. It broke out and it succeeded only be- cause an immense majority, one might say the entire country, wanted it. What did the privi- leged classes, upper classes and nobles amount to when confronted with the Third Estate of town and country ? They were one atom, two hundred thousand against twenty-four million, one one- hundredth part of the whole. And besides, the clergy and nobles were divided among themselves and uncertain what to do. There were privileges that the privileged themselves did not defend. They were doubtful about their own rights and their power, and seemed to let themselves go with the stream. Royalty itself, driven into a corner, had to convoke the States-General though it feared them.

As for the Third Estate, the huge mass com- posed of labourers, peasants, the industrial middle class, the merchants, the leisure class living on income {rentiers), and the artisans, it was prac- tically unanimous. It did not limit itself to pro- testing against royal absolutism or the parasitic

Revolutionary Majorities 53

nobility. It knew how to put a stop to all that. The memorials addressed to the throne all agree in proclaiming that the man and the citizen has rights, and that no prescription can hold good against these immortal titles to equality. And they specify the necessary guaranties. The king will continue to be the chief executive, but the national will is to make the laws. This sovereign will of the nation will be expressed by permanent and periodically elected national assemblies. Taxes shall only be levied when they have been voted by the National Assembly. Taxes will bear equally upon all the citizens. All privileges of caste shall be abolished. No man shall be ex- empt from taxation. No one shall have exclusive hunting and shooting rights. No one shall have the right to appear before a special tribunal. The same law for all, the same taxation for all, the same justice for all. Those feudal rights which are contrary to the dignity of man, those which are the sign of ancient serfdom, are to be abol- ished without indemnity. Those which encumber rural property and keep it unimproved are to be abolished by purchase. Every employment shall be open to all, and the highest rank in the army shall be attainable by the member of the middle class and the peasant, as well as by the noble. All forms of economic activity shall also be open to all. The permission of the guild and the au- thorisation of the government shall no longer be necessary before a man can take up this or that

54 Studies in Socialism

trade, create this or that industry, open this or that shop. The guilds themselves will cease to exist; and consequently the Church maintained as a public institution, like a guild, will no longer have a corporate existence. It will, then, no longer have corporate property. And the estates of the Church, the millions of acres of real estate that it holds, having no longer an owner, since the owning corporation is dissolved, will of right revert to the nation, with the reservation that the latter ensures public worship, education, and pub- lic charity.

It is true that the Revolution had to have re- course to force; the 14th of July and the loth of August mark the Fall of the Bastille and the tak- ing of the Tuileries. But — and this is a point that should be carefully noted — force was never employed to impose on the nation the will of a minority. On the contrary, force was employed to insure the almost unanimous will of the ma- jority against the factious attacks of the minority. On the 14th of July it was in opposition to the royal co^ip d'état, on the loth of August it was against the treachery of the King, that the people of Paris took up arms; and these acts represented the right of the nation, and were the expression of its will. It was not due to stupid submissive- ness that all France welcomed the 14th of July with acclamations, that almost all France ratified the loth of August. It was solely because the force of a part of the nation had put itself at the

Revolutionary Majorities 55

service of the universal will which had been be- trayed by a handful of courtiers, privileged per- sons, and traitors. Thus the use of force was in no way an audacious stroke on the part of a minority, but the vigorous means that the ma- jority took to defend itself.

It is of course true that the Revolution was led on to exceed its first demands and its opening programme. In 1789 not a single revolutionary foresaw the fall of the monarchy or desired it. The very word Republic was almost unknown, and even on the 21st of September, 1792, when the Convention abolished the monarchy, the idea of a Republic had not altogether ceased to terrify. But the monarchy did not fall under the assault of a passionate minority or the formulas of repub- lican philosophy. It was only lost when it became evident to almost the whole nation after repeated trials, after the royal co^ip d' état of the 20th June, 1789, after the 14th of July, after the King's flight to Varennes, and after the invasion, that the monarchy was betraying both the constitution and the country. Monarchy only fell when the contradiction between royalty and the universal will appeared in all its irreconcilable violence. It is evident then that it was by the necessary and logical action of the universal will, not by a sur- prise stroke of the minority, that monarchy was abolished.

It is undoubtedly true that the revolutionary

56 Studies in Socialism

leaders did not foresee all the economic and social consequences that would result from this act. Mirabeau, for instance, thought that the suppres- sion of royal monopolies and of guild privileges would bring into being in the new order a legion of small producers and independent artisans. He does not seem to have understood the great capi- talistic evolution of industry that was about to take place. But others saw more clearly, and the Gironde especially had foreseen that wealth and production (to use an expression of that time) would be like great rivers, the waters of which it would be hopeless to attempt to distribute into little streamlets.

At all events, if the Revolution did not know exactly what the secondary and indirect conse- quences of the economic and social réghne that it inaugurated would be, if it did not have a clear understanding either of capitalism, with its com- binations, its daring devices and its industrial crises, or of the antagonistic development of the proletariat, it did at all events know what régime it wanted to inaugurate. That revolutionary France in 1789 was able to have so well defined a conception of the ends for which it was working, and so powerful a will to bring about its desires, was due to the fact that even the boldest reforms that it proposed had either precedents in the past or exact models in real life.

The economic growth of the industrial and merchant middle-class in the seventeenth and

Revolutionary Majorities 57

eighteenth centuries and the great humane philo- sophic movement of the eighteenth century had indeed given an audacity and impetus to the public mind which had been unknown before. Never- theless the memory of the States-General of 1614 was a source of light and strength to the men of 1789, in spite of the two centuries of despotism which had intervened. The nation was not going out absolutely into the unknown; it was reviving a national tradition, while enlarging it and adapt- ing it to modern conditions.

Moreover, from the point of view of economic life and of agriculture and industry, it did not create unknown types of property and labour. It abolished guilds, and the masterships and warden- ships that went with them. But there were al- ready in existence whole regions and particularly progressive industries that were entirely freed from the guild system. In the suburbs of Paris, especially, characterised as they were by special industrial activity, the guild system no longer existed. The beginnings of capitalistic produc- tion with almost unlimited competition, with a variety of combinations, of joint-stock companies, sleeping partnership, etc., had been growing and getting more powerful for several generations. In the agricultural world, too, many peasant holdings had been freed from feudal burdens. The type of independent peasant-proprietors, ex- empt from dues, except possibly the hunting rights of the lord of the manor, had already come

58 Studies in Socialism

into being under the old order. The revolution- ary process, then, was really only an expansion, a growth of forms already well defined and well known.

When it came to the transformation of the Church the Revolution had strong analogies and vigorous precedents to go upon. The army and justice, which had been feudal institutions in the past, had become in large part State institutions. Why should not the Church as well cease to be a caste corporation and become a State institution ? Moreover, even under the old order. Church property was considered to have certain special attributes, and to be subject to State control. The Revolution cited with great effect the famous royal ordinance of 1749, which forbade the growth of the inalienable property (^mainmorte) of the Church by legacies. Thus, being controlled by the State, Church property was ready for na- tionalisation. Here, again, the Revolution had obvious and reliable facts to support it.

In 1789, then, men's minds did not meet in confused aspirations, but in the most precise of positive afiBrmations. Their wills came together and were harmonised in the full light, the perfect precision of French thought, formed and moulded by the eighteenth century. And the Revolution of 1789 was the work of an overwhelming and perfectly self-conscious majority.

In the same waj^ and in this case even more certainly, the Socialist Revolution will not be ac-

Revolutionary Majorities 59

complished by the action— the sudden surprise stroke — of a bold minority, but by the definite and harmonious will of the immense majority of the citizens. Whoever depends on a fortunate turn of events or the chances and hazards of physical force to bring about the Revolution, and resigns the method of winning over the immense majority of the citizens to our ideas, will resign at the same time any possibility of transforming the social order.

VII SOME SAYINGS OF LIEBKNECHT

On the yth of August, 1901, the first anniver- sary of lyiebknecht's death, Vorwàrts published some very important fragments by him.

Eike most journalists who are in the fighting line.Liebknecht was forced to scatter his thoughts, to deal with the daily problems one by one as they presented themselves. But, like many of that profession, too, he cherished the ambition of em- bodying his essential ideas in a lasting and serious work. His friends found an incomplete manu- script among his papers, written in 1 881, in which he had begun to formulate an answer to the great question : How shall Socialism be put i^ito practice f This work gives proof of an indomitable courage in its author, because it was at the very moment when the regime of the state of siege and Bis- marck's still undiminished power were weighing most heavily on the Socialist party, that Lieb- knecht asked himself, not whether Socialism would triumph, but how it would triumph. And this work shows at the same time his vivid sense of the difiSculties to be overcome and the neces- 60

Some Sayings of Liebknecht 6i

sary transition and evolution to be gone through with.

Here is a fragment of prime importance : ' ' The Practice of Socialism; what measures ought the Socialist party to adopt if, in the near future, it obtains an inflnerice on legislation f "

" I want to answer a question that has been asked, ' ' he writes. * ' But in order that a question may be answered properly, it must first be asked properl}'. Well, the preceding question has not been well put, at least it is not definite enough. Of course the steps to be taken depend essentially on the circumstances under which the Socialist party has obtained an appreciable influence on legislation. It is possible, and even likely, that Prince Bismarck, if he lives a while longer and keeps his power, will come to the same end as his model and master, Louis Napoleon of France. Some catastrophe for which he is responsible may break up the mechanism of the State, and call our party to govern or at least to share in the government.'^

I translate as literally as possible. This means that lyiebknecht foresaw, after a great national catastrophe, the total or partial assumption of power by the Socialist party.

" This castastrophe may come as the result of an unsuccessful war or an outburst of discontent which the ruling system will no longer be able to suppress. If either one of these alternatives oc- curs, our party will naturally take other measures

62 Studies in Socialism

and follow other tactics than if it had obtained an appreciable influence without the aid of such a catastrophe.

' ' We may even imagine, though we can scarcely count on it, that the danger will be understood by those in the upper circles, and that they will at- tempt to avert a catastrophe, otherwise inevitable, by introducing intelligent reforms. In this case, our party will be necessarily asked to participate in the government, and will be called îip07i especially to reform the co7iditions of labour. It is not necessary to go into further details as far as possibilities are concerned; those that we have imagined are enough to show that the kind of action we shall undertake will depend on the circumstances in which we shall have obtained ' an appreciable influence.'

' ' But what do we mean by appreciable or su£5- cient influence ? Are we talking about an exclu- sive influence, of the possibility of our being able to apply our principles, without other limitations than those imposed upon us by economic con- ditions themselves ? In other words, does the question take for granted that we shall have the governing power in our own hands ?

* ' Or does it simply mean that we shall have an influence over a government formed entirely or very largely by the other parties ? It is evident that we should act very diff"erently in the two cases.

" And within each of the two possibilities we have suggested there are endless degrees and

Some Sayings of Liebknecht 63

shades of difference, each one of which would call for a different kind of action."

According to Liebknecht, then, writing in 1881, there are two main hypotheses which can be le- gitimately formed when we are considering the possibility of the German Socialist party's at- taining power.

First it might be called upon to act after a great crisis, a national cataclysm, a disastrous war, or outburst of misery — by reason of some pro- found disturbance, in short, which would sweep away the old forces and would necessarily make way for the new. In this case, it is certain that the action of the Socialist party would be par- ticularly energetic. It would rise up full of power and self-confidence on the ruins of the Im- perial order and of the Imperial parties. And undoubtedly, with the aid of this great upheaval, it would be able to accomplish more for the people and the proletariat from the very beginning, than it could do at first if it obtained limited control as a result of the gradual evolution of the institutions of the Empire toward a policy of reform.

But even then, even if a great internal or ex- ternal storm were to uproot the conservative forces and raise up the power of the people, I^iebknecht is not certain that the Socialist party will have complete control. " Events," he says, " will call it to govern or to share in the government {an Oder doch in die Regierung)." It may possibly be able to obtain complete control. On the other

64 Studies in Socialism

hand, even after a revolutionary crisis, it may be forced to share the power with other demo- cratic parties. After the German 4th of Septem- ber, the Socialist party will have a much more considerable share of power in Germany than it had in France after the French 4th of September. But lyiebknecht does not feel certain that it will have complete control, that it will be free to gov- ern. It is possible that the bourgeois democracy will insist upon its share. And where will class- government be then ?

But there is another hypothesis: that in which the ruling powers in Germany, feeling the dan- ger, avert the catastrophe by a policy of reform.

" In this case," says Liebknecht, "our party would be necessarily asked to participate in the government, and especially called upon to reform the conditions of labour."

Liebknecht is not, then, considering a complete assumption of power by the Socialist party, in this hypothesis of political and social evolution. Lieb- knecht could not imagine and in fact he did not imagine that under the Empire, under William I., William II., or William III., the Socialist party would obtain from the beginning all the power, nor even that it would be able to grasp it the day after the fall of the Empire. No, according to him, a share only of the power, a place in the government, will be confided to the Socialist party by those in the " upper circles." But this Lieb- knecht considered an imperative necessity. For

Some Sayings of Liebknecht 65

the policy of reforms to be possible, for it to be efiScacious, for it to inspire the coufidence of the German people, the Socialist party must be called upon to direct it. The party must be represented and given an active part in the government. Liebknecht even goes to the length of almost sug- gesting what place in the cabinet it should occupy, and his suggestion bears a strong resemblance to the Ministry of Labour proposed by Citizen Vail- lant or the Ministry of Commerce occupied by Citizen Millerand. And Liebknecht says rightly that there will be shades of difference, degrees, and numberless forms, of this Socialistic participa- tion in the government. As the Socialist party is more or less powerful and well organised, as it is able to exercise a more profound influence or in- spire more real apprehension, its share of power will be more or less extended, more or less effect- ive; its action on all the non-Socialist members of the government with which it will be associated will be more or less decisive, and the reforms themselves will have a more or less marked Social- istic tendency, a more or less distinct proletarian character.

The future has never been interpreted in a broader-minded or more liberal spirit; and I con- sider the publication of these posthumous pages of Liebknecht an event of capital importance in the political and social life of Germany and the life of universal Socialism.

66 Studies in Socialism

It is important to understand that Liebkneclit foresaw that the Socialist party would obtain partial control of the government even under the Imperial régime. In 1881, during the state of siege instituted by Bismarck, in spite of the coali- tion of almost all the other parties united in their hatred of Socialism, Liebknecht, whose spirit was both bold and serene, foresaw that the Socialists would be called to take ofi&ce, and that the em- perors themselves would be constrained to call them; and he foresaw that the Socialists would not refuse this partial vindication, that they would not refuse to undertake this partial work. Holding themselves ready to profit fully by the Revolution if it should break out as a result of a national cataclj-sm, they would also, he predicted, be ready to enter into the evolutionary process if destiny decreed that evolution was to be the method of advance. They would be ready, in the interest of the nation and the interest of the prole- tariat, to become ministers of the Kaiser.

By what extraordinary phenomenon, by what inexplicable contradiction, did the man who pon- dered upon and wrote these carefully worked- over pages in 1881, in the full excitement of the revolutionary struggle, by what prodigious up- heaval of ideas did this same man condemn as bit- terly as he did the entrance of a French Socialist into a bourgeois government ? '

' Millerand was Minister of Commerce in the Waldeck- Rousseau Cabinet. See Introduction.

Some Sayings of Liebknecht 67

I only hazard the guess that his error in the Affaire Dreyfus had upset his judgment on all the events that resulted from it. Almost alone among the German Social Democrats, he was mis- taken about the very essence of the affair, and misunderstood its political and social meaning. From the moment he had entered upon a cer- tain line of thought he persevered in it with an inflexibility which was aggravated by his very isolation. The more he found himself alone, the more he persisted in the conviction that he was right. It was the inevitable other side to his sovereign qualities of firmness, of energy, and self-confidence. Naturally, then, he suspected or disapproved of everything that was historically associated with an agitation he had opposed. Since the application of the method he had ap- proved in 1 88 1 was made in France under circum- stances that irritated him, he did not even recog- nise the embodiment of his own thought in the progress of events.

Does the fact that he did not publish this work give any one the right to say that it has no value ? Involved in the whirlpool of activity, over- whelmed by the business of every day, he had not finished it. But he neither destroyed nor disa- vowed it. Perhaps he had decided that it would be imprudent to surrender his secret thought to the enemy, to tell him the tactics he had planned for the future. Perhaps, too, he was somewhat disconcerted by the events that followed the fall

68 Studies in Socialism

of Bismarck. The great enemy of the Chancel- lor had always magnified and, one might say, sa- tanised his part. He thought that Bismarck was going to drag the Empire down to the depths, that he would hurl it into some national catastro- phe. Well, Bismarck was dismissed in his old age without having compromised the peace of Europe or the solidity of the Empire by a single imprudent act. Liebknecht supposed that Bis- marck personified not only the danger but the strength of the Empire. Once Bismarck fallen, lie imagined that the Imperial institution would have no further support and would weakly adopt a regime of compromise under which the Socialist and popular forces would use their strength to such good purpose that they would attain politi- cal power. But William II., having dismissed Bismarck, was able to preserve the Empire in its autocratic and conservative character, and the Socialist party remained in violent and uncom- promising opposition. What point was there then in tracing a programme of action, of Socialist reorganisation, at a time that was still a period of war to the death, offensive and defensive? That is probably the explanation why Liebknecht had not published this important work, which reveals one whole aspect of his thought. I con- fess that when I read the strong clear lines I regretted that they had not been known at the time of the International Congress of Paris in 1900. That Congress hailed the great memory

Some Sayings of Liebknecht 69

of Liebknecht with a sort of pious fervour; per- haps some bitter words would have been soft- ened if it had been known that they struck at lyiebknecht himself.

VIII

I.IEBKNECHT ON SOCIALIST TACTICS

lyiEBKNECHT considered that the general tac- tics of the party were necessarily variable and dependent on circumstances. That method of procedure which of late years has gone by the somewhat insulting name of Socialist opportunism has never been more energetically formulated. I translate:

' ' We have now finished with general considera- tions. Before we begin on details, let us briefly sum up what has been said.

*' We have seen that it is impossible to decide beforehand on tactics for our Party which would hold good in every case. Tactics must depend upon circumstances. The interest of the Party is our only law, our only rule.

"We have seen that the ends of the Party should be wholly distinct from the means it adopts to gain those ends.

" The ends are inalterable ; it being of course clearly understood that we may look for a scien- tific extension, a perfecting of the programme. On the other hand, the means of combat and the 70

Liebknecht on Socialist Tactics 71

use that is made of them can change and ought to change.

" We have seen that the Party, in order to be capable of the highest possible degree of effective organisation and of action, ought to have before all things a clear idea of the essence of our move- ment, and that it must never neglect the essential for the non-essential,

' ' The essential thing, as we understand it, is that the unalterable principles of Socialism shall be put into practice in the State and in society as rapidly as possible.

" The non-essential question is how they shall be put into practice. Not that we wish to lessen the importance of tactics. But tactics are only a means of obtaining an end; and -whereas the end presents itself before us firm and immovable, we can argue about tactics. Questions of tactics are practical questions and should be absolutely dis- tinguished from questions of principle.

' ' We have seen, especially, that it is absolutely unjustifiable to consider that the tactics of force are the only revolutionary tactics, and to say that he is a poor revolutionist who does not uncon- ditionally approve these tactics. We have shown that force itself is not in its essence revolutionary, but rather belongs to the counter-revolution.

" We have seen the necessity of emancipating ourselves from the bondage of certain catch- words, and of developing the power of the Party in the direction of clear thought and brave and

12 Studies in Socialism

methodical action, instead of displaying it in phrases of revolutionary violence, which too often only serve to hide a lack of precise thought and vigorous action."

This is great teaching. But if questions of tactics are really of such secondary importance, what is the obstacle to a wide Socialist unity? All Socialists agree as to the aim: the establish- ment of Socialism, the necessity for a social or- ganisation of property with the object of abolish- ing all tolls upon the product of labour and of assuring the full development of every human personality.

They disagree as to the means, as to the tactics. Some, who share Liebknecht's opinion, have thought that during the period of the slow disso- lution of the capitalist S3'stem and of the slow elaboration of the Socialist régime, the Socialists would necessarily be called, at one time or an- other, to help form a government. Others have thought differently. It is a question of tactics, not an essential question. Some, eager to mul- tiply the barriers, have insisted that a constant, systematic, and unconditional refusal to vote the budget was the necessary and authentic hall- mark of Socialism. Others have quietly main- tained that the party ought not to be bound, and that if a budget included important reforms, and if on that account it was opposed by the reaction, the Socialists, in opposing it also, would be play- ing the game of the reaction. Here again we

Liebknecht on Socialist Tactics 72)

have a question of tactics, which will be decided by the very necessities of life and by the social and political evolution that will inevitablj' occur, a question hardly serious enough to call forth mutual recriminations and schisms in the party.

And just as tactics are subject to change, the programme, which is after all a part of the tactics, can be modified, revised, and completed. For my own part, I think it utterly incomplete and strangely inadequate. I think that it does not correspond any longer to the degree of develop- ment of the proletariat, and that it ought to be supplemented by a whole series of measures gradually admitting the working class to power and beginning half-communism in peasant produc- tion. Some, on the other hand, object violently to any plan of action which would, as they ex- press it, run the risk of weakening the class-con- sciousness of the proletariat by giving it a definite place in the present organisation. We may look for much controversy on this point whenever both sides are willing to think clearly. But here again we are dealing with a question of tactics, that is, as lyiebknecht says, a question naturally open to controversy. A schism on this subject is therefore harmful and unnecessary.

If I/iebknecht was in the right, if the appeal to force runs the risk of being counter-revolutionary in character, if we can and ought to succeed by means ot propaganda, organisation, clear think-

74 Studies in Socialism

ing, and a vigorous manipulation of the law, we ought not to rest content after we have repeated Liebknecht's ideas; we must apply them with method and consistency. Those who talk alter- nately of the vote and the rifle, those who, when universal suffrage favours them, give it their al- legiance, and when it goes against them, reject it, trouble the forward march of the party by the incoherence of their thought.

And when I say this I accuse myself as much as any one else. We all, or almost all, have con- fused ideas on the subject of tactics and our action is thereby hampered and weakened. By our con- stant use of republican lawful methods and of uni- versal suffrage, we weaken the instinct of revolt and the classical revolutionary tradition of an appeal to force. By our intermittent and purely rhetorical appeals to force, to the rifle, we weaken our hold on universal suffrage. We undoubtedly ought to make a decision, to ask ourselves whether it serves any useful purpose for us to mark the votes cast legally into the ballot-box with a few grains of powder, that, moreover, never explode.

Do we need the majority, and can we win it over to our side ? There lies the problem. If the answer is yes, then an appeal to force is, as I,iebknecht says, counter-revolutionary. Well, lyiebknecht answers Yes.

I translate again:

" We have pointed out, finally, that the Party,

Liebknecht on Socialist Tactics 75

iu order to put the Socialist ideas into practice, must conquer the power that is indispensable, and that it should do this first of all by means of propaganda.

" We have shown that the number of those whose interest forces them into the ranks of our enemies is so small that it is becoming almost negligible, and that the immense majority of those who have a hostile or at least hardly a friendly attitude toward us only take this position through ignorance of their own situation and of our efforts, and that we ought to exert all our strength to enlighten this majority and win it over."

Liebknecht, then, has stated the problem ex- actly, literally, as I state it. What steps ought we to take to win over the national majority to the full Socialist ideal, through methods of pro- paganda and lawful action ?

Liebknecht is so anxious to find a broad basis on which he can begin by uniting all the nation, with the idea of then lifting it up, step by step, to complete Socialism, that he considers even the compulsory insurance laws proposed by Bismarck as a preparation for Socialism. Although, in his eyes, the law dealing with accidents is hardly more than a flimsy paper toy, he sees in it a first recognition of Socialist thought.

" It embodies in a decisive manner the princi- ple of State regulation of production as opposed

7^ Studies in Socialism

to the laissez-faire system of the Manchester school. The right of the State to regulate pro- duction supposes the duty of the State to interest itself in labour, and State control of the labour of society leads directly to State organisation of the labour of society."

That was what Liebknecht said about the law dealing with accidents, which of all the insurance laws is the most superficial, the least intimately connected with the conditions of labour. How much more true is his criticism of the compulsory insurance against old age and sickness, which in fact creates a new right for the working class, and which constitutes a patrimony for the proletariat at once collective and personal; and how especially true it would be of insurance against non-employ- ment, which is both necessary and possible, and which would introduce the proletariat into the very heart of the productive system.

Liebknecht considers the fact that almost all the parties are obliged to support this proposed legislation, as one of the surest signs of the growth of Socialism in Germany.

" All the parties," he writes, " with the excep- tion of the most old-fashioned Manchesterian an- archists, who wish nothing less than to resolve the State into atoms and deliver society to the ' free ' exploitation of the owning classes, rival each other in their solicitude for the ' poor man ' and for the working class; and there is no doubt

Liebknecht on Socialist Tactics T^j

that Priuce Bismarck, if he wants to, can com- mand a majority in the present Reichstag for his State Socialism. That the Protestant and Catho- lic clerg3', the small farmers and great landed proprietors, should accommodate themselves to the State Socialism — the priests call it Christian Socialism — is after all not so very astonishing.

" But the most striking phenomenon, and one without analogy in modern times, is the attitude of the National Liberals. Split into factions and discredited though they may be, they are an es- sential part of the German bourgeoisie, they are themselves the typical bourgeois, and they have reconciled themselves to State Socialism."

In other words, since the pressure of events and the growing organisation of the Socialist party and the proletariat have finally induced even those classes and those parties which would be naturally most opposed to them to accept the pro- jects of social legislation " which will lead inev- itably straight to Socialism"; since the immense majority of the nation has allowed itself to be started in the direction of Socialism, and, one might say, lifted up to the first step of social or- ganisation, we may conclude that in the same waj' the immense majority of the nation can be lifted step by step, by means of an ever more active and definite propaganda, by an ever more energetic proletarian influence, and an ever more effective mechanism of reforms, to the level of our ultimate ideal.

78 Studies in Socialism

This is Liebkuecht's strong and firm conclu- sion. The great majority of the nation can be won over to our side by propaganda and lawful action, and led to complete Socialism, The whole nation, with the exception of a few refractory but powerless elements, will rise, if we are determined that it shall, by the roads that lead up from bour- geois individualism to State Socialism, and from State Socialism to Communistic, human, and proletarian Socialism.

The majority can and ought legally to be ours.

IX

"TO EXPAND, NOT TO CONTRACT"

LiEBKNECHT's thought is full of contradictions. I imagine that his mind, like that of many of the early Socialists, was divided between the un- compromising dogmas of the first days and the new necessities of the larger party, and that he was not always able to balance these conflicting tendencies.

Liebknecht had begun by being an anti-parlia- mentary revolutionist. He had declared and had written that Parliament was a swamp in which Socialist energies would be engulfed. He had said that the open tribune of Parliament would be useless even as a means of spreading propaganda, because one could preach better in the country itself. And even after the pressure of events and the growth of the party had forced Liebknecht to discard those formulas, and when he and his friends had entered Parliament, he still kept a memory of his early uncompromising attitude. He reminds us, in the fragment quoted in Vor- warts, that he had objected to a representative of the Socialist group becoming one of the " steering 79

So Studies in Socialism

committee" that regulates parliamentary work. His colleagues did not follow his advice, and they were perfectly right; because what good would it have done to enter Parliament, if, on the pre- text of not wishing to compromise themselves, the Socialists had held aloof from the detailed work that alone makes parliamentary action effective ?

I only notice this small trait because it symbol- ises a state of mind. Hampered by the definite words he had spoken in the past, I^iebknecht at one time took the attitude of being in Parliament as if he were not in it. When, on the other hand, be was considering the conditions under which Socialism could be put into practice, when he tried to read the future in all sincerity and seri- ousness, he arrived at a very broad-minded conception : he saw Socialism penetrating the democracy little by little, and, by partial and successive conquests, imposing itself even on the government of middle-class society in the transi- tion stage. Then he was troubled and recap- tured by his early habits of uncompromising opposition. And all the doubts and disturbances, the chaos of our modern Socialism, come from the same contradiction between old formulas which are no longer true, but which we do not dare to renounce specifically, and new needs which we are beginning to realise, but which we do not dare to confess openly. An example of this sort of contradiction is the fact that I^iebknecht, in the

"To Expand, Not to Contract" 8i

very same manuscript in which he foresees the governmental collaboration of Socialism with other democratic factions, nevertheless repeats and seems to agree with the phrase so vigorously- condemned by Marx: " From the Socialist point of view, all the other parties form only a single reactionary body." And this is also in direct op- position to the practice of the German Socialists themselves, who do not hesitate to support the liberal bourgeoisie in their struggle against the small land-owners and the remnants of agrarian feudalism. But lyiebknecht atoned for the breadth, comprehensiveness, and elasticity of his contribution to the theory of Socialist action by the dogmatism of this narrow formula.

As a matter of fact, his definition of the work- ing class is of the broadest:

" We must not limit our conception of the term ' working class ' too narrowly. As we have ex- plained in speeches, tracts, and articles, we include in the working class all those who live exclusively ox principally by means of their own labour and who do not grow rich through the work of others.

"Thus, besides the wage-earners, we should include in the working class the small farmers and small shopkeepers, who tend more and more to drop to the level of the proletariat — in other words, all those who suffer from our present sys- tem of production on a large scale.

" Some maintain, it is true, that the wage- earning proletariat is the only really revolutionary

82 Studies in Socialism

class, that it aloue forms the Socialist army, and that we ought to regard with suspicion all adher- ents belonging to other classes or other conditions of life. Fortunately these senseless ideas have never taken hold of the German Social Democracy,

" The wage-earning class is most directly af- fected by capitalist exploitation; it stands face to face with those who exploit it, and it has the especial advantage of being concentrated in the factories and yards, so that it is naturally led to think things out more energetically and finds itself automatically organised into ' Battalions of workers.' This state of things gives it a revolu- tionary character which no other part of society has to the same degree. We must recognise this frankly.

" Every wage-earner is either a Socialist al- ready, or on the highroad to becoming one. The wage-earners of the national workshops in France, whom the middle-class government of the Feb- ruary Republic wished to make use of against the Social proletariat, went over to the enemy at the crucial moment. In the same way we see how those trades-unions that were started by the agents of the German middle class to oppose the Socialist workmen, either have maintained only the shadow of an existence or have in their turn been swept into the current of Socialist ideas. The wage- earner is led toward Socialism by all his sur- roundings, by all the conditions in which he finds himself. He is forced to think by the very con-

*'To Expand, Not to Contract" 83

ditions of his life, and as soon as he thinks he becomes a Socialist.

" But if the wage-earner suffers more directly and visibly under the system of capitalist ex- ploitation, the small farmers and shopkeepers are as truly affected by it, although in a less direct and obvious manner.

" The unhappy situation of the small farmers almost all over Germany is as well known as the artisan movement. It is true that both small farmers and small shopkeepers are still in the camp of our adversaries, but only because they do not understand the profound causes that underlie their deplorable condition: it is of prime import- ance for our party to enlighten them and bring them over to our side. This is a vital questio7i for our party, because these two classes forjn the ma- jority of the 7iation. It would be both stupid and ingenuous to exact that we should have a ma- jority sealed and ready in our pockets before we began to apply our principles. But it would be still more ingenuous to imagine that we could put our principles into practice against the will of the immense majority of the nation. / ' * This is a fatal error for which the French Socialists have paid dear.

" Is it possible to put up a more heroic fight than did the workmen of Paris and layons ? And has not every struggle ended in a bloody defeat, the most horrible reprisals on the part of the victors, and a long period of exhaustion for the

84 Studies in Socialism

proletariat? The French proletariat has not yet fully grasped the importance of organisation and propaganda, and that is why up to the present moment it has been beaten with perfect regularity.

' ' The lesson of the Commune seems, happily, to have served a useful purpose in educating the proletariat. Our French comrades are hard at work perfecting their organisation and are spread- ing propaganda, especially in country districts.

' ' The German Socialists, on the contrary, have long understood the importance of propaganda and the necessity of winning over the small shop- keeping class and the small farmers.

* ' A tiny nmioriiy alone dema7ids that the Socialist movement shall be limited to the wage-earyiing class.

" The frothy and theatrical phrases of the fanatic supporters of the ' Class-Struggle ' dogma were at bottom a cover for Machiavellian schetnes of reac- tio7ia ry feudalism .

" The hyper-revolutionary dress-parade Social- ism, that addresses itself exclusively to ' the horny-handed sons of toil,' has two advantages for the reaction. First, it limits the Socialist movement to a class that in Germany at least is not large enough to bring about a revolution; and besides this, it is an excellent way of frightening the main body of the people who are half in- different, especially the peasants and the petty bourgeoisie, who have not yet organised any independent political activity."

"To Expand, Not to Contract'' 85

And Liebknecht put the finishing touch to this thought by the following vigorous words:

" We ought not to ask, ' Are you a wage- earner? ' but ' Are you a Socialist ? '

" If it is limited to the wage-earners, Socialism cannot conquer. If it includes all the workers and the moral and intellectul élite of the nation, its victory is certain.

* ' Why are we forced to stand by now while our friends are persecuted ? Why do we have to submit to the most indecent outrages ? Because we are still weak. Why are we weak ? Because a small part of the people aloue understands the Socialist doctrine.

"And shall we, who are feeble, become still more feeble by excluding thousands of men from our movement on the pretext that chance has not made them members of a given social group ? Stupidity would in this case become treason to the Party.

" Not to contract, but to expand, ought to be our motto, — the circle of Socialism should widen more and more until we have converted most of 07ir adversaries to being friends, or at least disarmed their opposition.

" And the indifferent mass, that in peaceful days has no weight in the political balance, but becomes the decisive force in times of agitation, ought to be so fully enlightened as to the aims and the essential ideas of our Party, that it will cease to fear us and can be no longer used as a weapon against us.

S6 Studies in Socialism

" All the legislative measures which we shall support if the opportunity is given us, ought to have for their object to prove thejihiess of Socialism to serve the comvion good, and to destroy current prejudice against us."

Thus lyiebknecht imagines a whole period of legislative action during which Socialism will have the opportunity of proving its large view of things, when the blindest will be forced to see in it the party of the common good, and during which it will accustom all the finest minds and the noblest consciences, and all the petty bour- geoisie and peasants, to follow it without fear and without shrinking, even to the complete applica- tion of its theory and its ideal.

The propaganda of action will in this way sup- plement the propaganda of speech.

X

SOCIALISM AND THE PRIVILEGED

CLASSES

The Socialist party ought not of course to be a confused echo of discordant interests: it must not allow its thought to be troubled or distorted by the chaos of present conditions. It ought to sub- mit a definite platform for the consideration of the people, a definite method of evolving toward a perfectly clear end. But this plan of action must take into full consideration the diversity of ele- ments to be dealt with, their passions, interests, and prejudices. These are Liebknecht's exact words :

" Important as it is to give the freest possible play to all the different groups of interests so that they may be able to express their ideas and their needs, and to allow the people to collaborate in legislation as fully as possible, it would be folly to abandon all legislation to the initiative of the people, folly from the point of view of the govern- ment and from that of Socialism as well.

" Socialism should have a definite, easily un- derstood platform, which it should submit to the 87

88 Studies in Socialism

representatives of the people, and the different representativ^es of the interests involved.

" Social Democracy dififers from all other parties in this, that its activity is not limited to certain aspects of the life of the State and social life, but that it embraces all aspects equally and tries to bring about order, peace, and harmony by recon- ciling the antagonistic forces in the State and in society.

"It is not the party of the great landed pro- prietors and the feudal interests, and, therefore, it is not, like the Conservative party, constrained to serve the interests of the great and small land- owners. It is not the party of the different branches of the bourgeoisie and consequently it is not, like the National Liberals and the Progress- ives, bound to serve the particular interests and cater to the love of power of the bourgeoisie.

" It is not the party of the priest caste, and it is not therefore bound to further the interests and cater to the love of power of the priest caste, as in the Catholic Centre and the Protestant faction of Social Christianity à la Stocker.

' '// is the party of all the people with the exception of two hiuidred thousand great proprietors, small proprietors, bourgeois, and priests.

" // ought, then, to tiirn toward the people, and as soon as the occasion arises, by practical proposals and projects of legislatio7i of general i^iterest, to give positive proof that the good of the people is its 07ily aim, the will of the people its only rule.

The Privileged Classes 89

" It must follow the path of legislation without injuring any one, but with a firm purpose and an unchangeable ideal.

" Even those who now enjoy privileges and monopolies ought to be made to understand that we do not propose to adopt any violent or sudden measures against those whose position is now sanctioned by law, and that we are resolved, in the interests of a peaceful and harmonious evolu- tion, to bring about the transition from legal in- justice to legal justice with the greatest possible consideration for the individuals who are now privileged monopolists.

" We recognise that it would be unjust to hold those who have built up a privileged situation for themselves on the basis of bad legislation person- ally responsible for that bad legislation, and to punish them personally.

" We especially state that in our opinion it is the duty of the State to give an indemnity to those whose interests will be injured by the neces- sary abolition of laws contrary to the common good in so far as this indemnity is consistent with the interests of the nation as a whole.

" We have a higher conception of the duty of the State toward the individual than our advers- aries have, and we shall not lower it, even if we are dealing with our adversaries."

I do not quote these splendid words with the idea of covering my own Socialist policy with the mantle of a revolutionary authority. The Social-

90 Studies in Socialism

ist party would be very contemptible and very cowardly if each one of us did not express his own thought without any more support than that furnished by reason alone.

No, we do not need to seek the authority or protection of any one in our effort to find the most convenient road, the broadest, clearest, pleasantest, and quickest way of reaching our goal. We make our effort openly, and the prole- tariat joins with us.

And to tell the truth, I think that in Lieb- knecht's own mind these ideas, at once so noble and so practical, were counteracted and clouded by too many different or even contrary theories to be able to exert a profound and useful influ- ence. I think the time has come to ponder them seriously, and to make them the very foundation of our policy and our theory, instead of only a brilliant side-issue. I think that if the Socialist party refused to allow these thoughts to remain general formulas, if it embodied them in a politi- cal platform of broad and just evolution toward a well defined Communism, if it gave the impres- sion of being at once generous and practical, ar- dent and the friend of peace, firm in its opposition to unjust institutions and decided in its resolution to do away with them methodically, and concili- atory, too, toward individuals, it would hasten the true Social Revolution by fifty years, the Revolu- tion that will be embodied in conditions, in laws, and in our hearts; and it would free the great

The Privileged Classes 91

work of proletarian Revolution from the sickening and cruel odour of blood, of murder, and of hate which still clings to the bourgeois Revolution.

But before I leave lyiebknecht, I want to quote a few more fragments which show the same high- minded, broadly humanitarian attitude, the same desire for a just and peaceful evolution.

" In our work of propaganda, as in our legisla- tive action, we must never lose sight of the uni- versality of the Socialist conception. . . ,

" One side is especially economic, another hu- man and moral, a third political.

" We should give equal weight to these three sides in our propaganda and in our law-making,

" The people should learn by experience that Socialism is not only the regulation of the condi- tions of labour and of production; that it does not only propose to intervene in the economic func- tions of the State and of the social organism, but that it aims at the most complete development of the individual and his personality; that it con- siders education one of the essential duties of the State, and that its conception of a civil and social ideal is that every individual should embody as fully as possible the ideal human qualities.

" The deep significance of Socialism lies in the fact that it unites and fuses the most sublime ideals.

" Without the economic side, the human ideal would remain in the air.

92 Studies in Socialism

"Without the human side, the economic aim would lack moral consecration.

" The two are iudissolubly united.

' ' There have always been dreamers who have glowed with enthusiasm for the happiness of the human race. But theirs were idle dreams or use- less devices, because the material physical means of realising them were lacking. On the contrary, the orderly regulation of economic conditions which Socialism wishes to introduce, and which will insure both an increase in the volume of pro- duction and a juster distribution, creates the eco- nomic foundation for a human existence in the best sense of the term, the harmonious develop- ment of the individual.

" Even the advantages of a common ownership of property and co-operative labour were under- stood in the past, and the very principles of the Community of Communism were put into prac- tice, but the human ideal that characterises So- cialism was lacking and historic Communism is rightly judged to have been on a lower grade of civilisation than our present bourgeois society.

' ' Socialism presupposes our modern civilisation. It does not go counter to it in any way. Far from being the enemy of civilisation. Socialism wishes to extend it to all humanity, whereas now it is the monopoly of a privileged minority.

" Since Socialism includes in its domain all the life, all the feelings and thoughts of man, it can- not become narrow or exclusive; and this gives it

The Privileged Classes 93

the immense advantage of being able to produce an effect as beneficial as it is harmonious on the whole field of civil and political life."

I add one last quotation showing lyiebknecht's care for the details of practical action. Having given several pages to the question of reforms in taxation, he continues:

' ' Some people may be surprised that we lay so much stress on the question of taxation, since in the Socialist State there will be no question of taxation.

" It is true that if we could pass over to Social- ism at one bound, we should not need to concern ourselves with taxation at all, because the funds necessary for public expenses would come from the product of social labour. And in a still further stage of development, when all economic functions would be State concerns, there would be no longer any difference between public and private expenses.

' ' But we are not going to attain Socialism at one bound. The transition is going on all the time, and the important thing for us, in this explanation, is not to paint a picture of the future — which in any case would be useless labour — but to forecast a practical progra77ime for the intermediate period, to formulate a^id justify vieasures that shall be applic- able at once, and that will serve as aids to the new Socialist birth.^^

XI

THE NECESSITY FOR A MAJORITY

I HAVE shown, and indeed the statement is self- evident, that the Revolution of 1789 would have come to nothing if it had not had the will of the immense majority of the nation back of it, and I have said that the same truth holds good in the case of the Socialist Revolution; more than all others it must be the work of an immense ma- jority of the nation. In bringing out clearly the magnitude of the effort that must be made I hope that I am not discouraging but spurring on the energy and conscience of those to whom I speak. At all events, if the work to be accomplished is vast and entails the co-operation of innumerable wills, I shall also show that the resources and forces at our command are likewise vast, and that it only depends on us to march forward to an end both certain and victorious. But I maintain that the vehement effort of a Socialist minority will not suffice, and that we must rally round us al- most the whole body of citizens. These are the reasons:

In the first place, the Socialist minority is not opposed to an inert and passive mass. In the 94

The Necessity for a Majority 95

hundred and twenty years that have passed since the Revolution, human energy, already excited by the Reformation and the Renaissance, has devel- oped a prodigious animation. In all classes and in all conditions of life we find active wills, forces in motion. Everywhere the individual has become self-conscious. Everywhere greater and greater efforts are being made. The working class has shaken off its drowsiness and passivity. But the lower middle-class is also active. In spite of the often crushing weight of the present economic sys- tem, it is not altogether subdued; it is constantly making an effort to better itself. And if it often seeks its deliverance by the most reactionary ideas, the most detestable politics, and the most sterile and degrading jingo patriotism, it is none the less an active and passionate power. It forms leagues, and in Paris it holds the Republican and Socialist democracy in check. That is to say, it will oppose a resistance that may be effective, to any social movement to which it has not been gradually converted, at least to a certain degree. In the same way the small peasant-proprietors have played a great rôle ever since the Revolu- tion, sometimes on the side of reaction, sometimes on that of liberty. Save for some glorious and fairly numerous exceptions, they took fright at the idea of the Red Terror in 1851, and contributed to the success of the coup d'etat and the Empire. Since then they have been gradually won over by the Republic and have become one of the living

go Studies in Socialism

forces back of it. They are perfectly conscious of their political power. They have begun to hold municipal office, they know that they make the deputies, the members of the provincial legisla- tures, and the senators, and they would have no tolerance for a great social movement in which they took no part.

I think it extremely short-sighted to say that if the peasants are neutral, that will be enough, that all Socialism asks of them is to stand aside pass- ively. No social force can remain neutral when a great movement is on foot. If they are not with us, they will be against us.

And, anyway, since the CoUectivist system presupposes the co-operation of the peasants (for example, they must be willing to sell their pro- duce at the common shop) their passive resistance would be enough to starve and defeat the Revolu- tion. They know their power and they are not going to let it drop from their hands. Even the economic initiative they have shown for several years, the spirit of progress that animates them, everything, points to the fact that they would not allow their share in great social events to be a purely passive one, when those events will have an immediate reaction on their own lives. Either they will help them, or they will defeat them.

And yet another element must be considered. The privileged classes have to-day infinitely more authority, and therefore more power, than the privileged classes before 1789. The industrial

The Necessity for a Majority 97

middle-class has retained a vital force. It has follov/ed the laws of scientific progress. It is constantly adopting new methods of production and renewing and impro^nng its machinery. And even from the standpoint of the social struggle, the battle between the classes, it has readjusted its method of warfare; the invention of trade- unions of which the employer is also a member and to which he grants special privileges' is a proof of the audacity and suppleness of its re- sources. What a contrast between the activity of a great prelate under the ancien regime, and a great modern capitalist! Some of these, like cer- tain American millionaires, seem to have inherited the activity of Napoleon. And even in France, in a more modest degree, the capitalist class is ever on the alert. It is not from indifferent and drowsy classes, but from active, foresighted, and bold classes that the proletariat must wring its privileges. How can it do this if it has not the nation on its side ? If the mass of the nation is hostile, it will be crushed. And if it is only dis- trustful, the manoeuvres of the capitalist class will soon change that distrust to hostility.

Thus we see that the universal motion and vi- tality of modern life and the universal activity of energy no longer admit of successful action by minorities. There are no longer dormant masses

' They are called "yellow unions " in distinction to the ' red " Socialist unions.

7

98 Studies in Socialism

that a vigorous push can shake iuto hfe. There are everywhere centres of force which would quickly become centres of resistance and points of reaction, if they were not moving gradually in the direction of the new society of their own accord.

In the second place, the transformation of prop- erty that Socialism wishes and ought to accomp- lish is much vaster, more far-reaching, and much more subtle than that accomplished one hundred and ten years ago by the revolutionary middle class.

In 1789 the Revolution struck at a form of property marked out by narrow limits. When the possessions of the Church were nationalised it was a corporate property very clearly defined that was being absorbed. Outside of the Church and of the regular and secular clergy, not a single person who owned property had to fear that the law of expropriation which had been decreed against the Church would react on him. The Abbé Maury tried in vain to spread a panic: the bourgeois and peasant-proprietors knew too well that the property of the Church was clearly de- fined, and that expropriation would not go beyond those limits.

In the same way, when the Revolution abol- ished feudal rights, that too was a definite meas- ure, with results known beforehand and limited in scope. There were undoubtedly some cases of

The Necessity for a Majority 99

feudal rights in connection with non-feudal prop- ert}^ but, on the whole, the nobles were the only- ones affected. The very nature of feudal dues, which presupposed a bond of personal depend- ence, reserved the benefits accruing therefrom to a single class of persons.

It is quite otherwise with capital, whose very- essence it is to be diffused. It has no certain and known limits. It is not concentrated in the hands of a corporation like the Church, or a caste like the nobility. It is of course true that the titles that represent it are very far from being as widely dispersed as the made-to-order optimism of bourgeois political-economists would have us believe. But it is true that they are not reserved to any given category of titular proprietors and that they are fairly generally distributed. There are small property-owners even in the villages. And if a coup-de-force of the minority were sud- denly to abolish capitalist property, unexpected centres of resistance would spring into being everywhere. Only by definite and nicely graded steps, by which their interests are fully protected, can the medium and small owners be brought to consent to the transformation of capitalist prop- erty to social property. And it is perfectly cer- tain that these legal adjustments can only be conducted and these guaranties established by the calm deliberation and legalised will of the majority of the nation.

In the same way the transformation of agrarian

loo Studies in Socialism

property and its evolution toward a system broadly Communistic will be impossible as long as the peasant proprietors are not fully reassured. The adhesion of the peasant proprietors is the more necessary because in comparison with them the number of large rural proprietors is constantly decreasing. But their adhesion is not to be won by a sudden movement, whose effects they have not been able to calculate. They will only sup- port a movement that has been fully discussed with them, and one that, by constantly raising their productive power and standard of life, will reassure them completely as to the end and object of Socialist action.

And this is not all. In 1789 the Revolution had only a negative work to perform in the do- main of property, that is to saj^ it abolished, it did not create. It did away with Church property', but the confiscated estates of the Church were put up for sale. It converted them directly into a known form of private property. And when feudal rights were abolished, what happened was that the property of the peasant was freed of a certain burden, but the fundamental character- istics were not altered. The peasant was simply more fully possessed of that which was alread}'- his in some degree. But the Revolution did not bring into being any new form of property. It did not imagine any new social type. Its work of liberty was limited to the breaking of fetters. It did not have to create, it did not have to or-

The Necessity for a Majority loi

ganise. All society asked of it was destruction; once this destruction had been accomplished so- ciety itself went confidently forward along the route already partly traversed.

The Socialist Revolution, on the contrary, must not rest content after it has abolished capitalism; it must create the new type under which produc- tion is to be carried on and the relations of prop- erty are to be regulated.

Imagine that all capitalistic claims on produc- tion cease, that the ledger of the public debt is destroyed, that tenants pay no more rent, that tenant-farmers pay no land-rent, that farmers who hold land as métayers are no longer required to hand over half their produce to the bourgeois proprietor, that all ground-rent, all commercial profit, all dividends and industrial profits are abolished; if this destruction of capitalism were not instantly supplemented by a Socialistic or- ganisation, if society did not know at once how labour was to be carried on, what was to be the function of the State, of local government, and of the trade-union, and according to what principles the producers were to be remunerated; if, in a word, society were not able to ensure the proper working of a new social system, it would fall into an abyss of disorder and misery, and the Revolu- tion would be lost in one day.

But this new social system cannot be created and inspired by a minority. It can only function with the approval of an immense majority of the

102 Studies in Socialism

citizens. And it is the majority of the citizens that will multiply little by little the germs and tentative undertakings from which the new social order will arise. It is this majority that will gradually create, from capitalistic chaos, the vari- ous types of social property, co-operative, com- munal, and trade-union ; and it will only demolish the last remains of the capitalist edifice when it has firmly established the foundations of the So- cialist order and when the new building is ready to give shelter, to mankind. In this immense task of social construction, the immense majority of the citizens must co-operate.

We must never forget the new and grandiose character of the Socialist Revolution. The com- mon good will be its object. For the first time since the beginning of human history, a great social upheaval will have for its aim, not the sub- stitution of one class for another, but the destruc- tion of class and the inauguration of a universal humanity.

In the Socialist order, discipline and the smooth co-operation of individual wills will not be main- tained by the authority of one class over another, but will come as the result of the free will of associated guardians of the peace.

How, then, can a system based on the free col- laboration of all be instituted against the will, or even without the aiding will, of the greater num- ber? All the social forces that were either re- fractory or inert would be such a drag on Socialist

The Necessity for a Majority 103

production, and would use up so much energy and elasticity in numberless jars and frictions, that the whole system would end in disaster. It can only succeed by the general and almost unanimous desire of the community.

Destined for the benefit of all, it must be pre- pared and accepted by almost all, practically in- deed by all; because the hour inevitably arrives when the power behind an immense majority dis- courages the last efforts to resist its will. The noblest thing about Socialism is precisely that it is not the regime of a minority. It cannot, there- fore, and ought not to be imposed b}'^ a minority.

I must add, further, that the long exercise of universal suffrage has made it more and more difiicult, if not impossible, for the minority alone to carry through any enterprise successfully. Universal suffrage, indeed, is constantly throwing light on the respective strength of the different parties. It is perpetually and publicly taking their measure. For a minority to attempt any independent movement when all the country knows, and it knows itself, that it is in the min- ority, is, then, extremely difficult.

In 1830 and 1848 the revolutionary minority which rose up could say, and could make others believe, that it represented the thought of the ma- jority. Because this majority, under a system of limited suffrage, was voiceless. I do not speak of the fall of the Empire, whose collapse was due

I04 Studies in Socialism

in greater measure to its defeat by Germany than to the Revolution. But undoubtedly the great weakness of the Commune was to have to deal with an Assembly which, reactionary though it was, was the outcome of universal suffrage and of the general will of the nation.

A minority that, having taken part in the eleC' tions and having accepted them as a gauge, should then attempt to go against the will of the majority by violence, would be in an utterly false position. And it would be opposed by a majority that, armed with the consciousness of its own force which the authentic figures of the ballot would give, would not only not yield but in all probability would rally to its standard many ele- ments from the revolting minority.

Further, the Socialist party does not limit its demand to the establishment of universal sufi'rage in all countries. It wishes universal sufifrage with proportional representation. Liebknecht, in the fragment published by Vorzvàrts, demands proportional representation. The Socialists in Belgium have seconded him. Citizen Vaillant, in a recent article, adheres in principle to the scrutin de liste, ^ under the absolute condition that pro-

' According to the system of the scrutin de liste, the voter, instead of casting his ballot for a single represent- ative of a small election district, votes for a list of repre- sentatives, the whole number to which his county or state is entitled. The system of proportional representa- tion is based on the scrutin de liste, with certain modifica-

The Necessity for a Majority 105

portional representation should be instituted. This is also the opinion of Citizen Guesde. But to ask for minority representation is to ask that each force, each tendency in the country should constantly make public its exact numerical strength. It is to wish that the share of electoral and parliamentary influence of each party should be exactly calculated on its actual strength in the country. It is, then, to proclaim all legislation arbitrary that does not emanate from the true majority.

According to the admission of every section of the party, then, the Socialist Revolution will be brought about by the will of all, the power of a majority. The partisans of a general strike are the only ones to maintain that the action of the industrial proletariat, or even the most active and self-conscious part of that proletariat, imsupported by other sections of the community, would be enough to determine the advent of Communism, the Social Revolution.

tions which ensure the representation of minorities in proportion to their voting strength. See La Representa- tion Proportionelle : La Chesnais.

XII

THE GENERAI. STRIKE AND REVOLU- TION

When we speak of the general strike, we must begin by defining the words very clearly. We are not concerned, of course, with the general strike of a single trade. For instance, when the miners of all France decide by the vote of a ma- jority that the time has come for them all to strike to obtain an eight-hour day, a higher pension for old employés, and a minimum wage, it is a very important strike, and may be called a general miners' strike. But that is not what is meant by the words " general strike " in the par- lance of those who see in it the decisive means of emancipation. They are not thinking of the limited movement of one trade, no matter how vast its extent. On the other hand, it would be puerile to say that there could not be a general strike unless all wage-earners, in all departments of production, quit work simultaneously. The working class is too much dispersed for such unanimity to be possible or even conceivable. io6

Strike and Revolution 107

But the words ' ' general strike ' ' have another meaning, verj^ precise, and at the same time very comprehensive. They mean that the most im- portant trades, those that dominate the whole productive system, shall stop work at the same time. If, for instance, the railroad employés, the miners, dockers, and longshoremen, the employés in the weaving and spinning industries, and the building-trade employés in the great cities, were to quit work simultaneously, we might say that there was a general strike. Because to bring about a general strike it is not neces- sary that the whole number of trades should be in line; it is not even necessary that in the trades that are on strike every single workman should go out. It is sufficient if those trades where the power of capital is most concentrated and the power of labour best organised, and that are therefore the key-stone of the economic system, decide on a suspension of work, and it is enough if they are backed up by such a large number of workmen that the work of those trades is stopped.

It cannot be objected that a general strike, if this meaning be given to the phrase, is either chimerical or useless. In proportion to the growth of the labour movement, the possibility of this kind of concerted action is increased. And such action can exercise an enormous influence on the ruling class. It is no longer a single trade, no matter how important, that refuses to work, but a whole union of trades. The movement is

io8 Studies in Socialism

no longer, then, a trade movement; it has be- come a class movement. And could such a move- ment be barren of important results, organised and carried through as it would be by the essen- tially productive class, that class for which no substitute can be found because none exists ?

But there must be no misunderstanding on this point. It must not be imagined that there is a magic virtue in the phrase " general strike," and that the strike itself is absolutely and uncondi- tionally efficacious. A general strike is practical or chimerical, useful or disastrous, according to the conditions under which it takes place, the method it employs, and the end it proposes.

There are, according to my opinion, three in- dispensable conditions for the utility of a general strike, ist. The working class must be deeply and truly convinced of the importance of the ob- ject for which it is declared. 2d. A large section of public opinion must be prepared to recognise the legitimacy of that object. 3d. The general strike must not seem like a disguise for violence, but simply the exercise of the legal right to strike, more systematic in method and vaster in scope than usual, it is true, and with a more clearly marked class character.

First, it is essential that the body of organised labour should attach very great importance to the object for which the strike is declared. Neither the decisions of trade-union congresses, nor the

Strike and Revolution 109

orders of workmen's committees would be strong enough to drag the workers into a struggle al- ways formidable, but especially so under these conditions. To brave privation and misery, even with the object of escaping from the situation in which one is sunk, requires great energy. Such energy cannot be roused in an entire class with- out the influence of really passionate feeling. And this in its turn is not aroused in men's souls to the degree when it becomes a working and fighting force, except by an interest both very close and very overwhelming, by a very important aim that can be immediatel)'' realised.

For instance, it is easy to understand how the best organised, the most self-conscious trades, edu- cated by a definite and widespread propaganda on the subject, may come to be passionately in- terested in the eight-hour day, in pensions for old age and accidents, and effective insurance against non-emploj'ment. One can imagine that, if the authorities refused to face these questions or op- posed the workmen's solution, enough energy and fervour might be accumulated to bring about the declaration of a great and persevering strike. The working class is willing to fight for definite and great ends, for positive, extended, and im- mediately practicable reforms. Under conditions such as these, but under no others, the signal given by the labour organisations will be obeyed.

But even if the proletariat is really roused and passionately in earnest, that is not enough. It is

no Studies in Socialism

not enough for it to follow its own inner impulse if it has not also received a mandate from with- out. It must have demonstrated to a notable fraction of public opinion that its claims are legiti- mate and immediately realisable. Every general strike will necessarily bring about disorders in economic relations; it will upset many tradi- tions and go counter to many interests. The opinion of the mass of the nation (and even of that very considerable portion of the wage-earn- ing class who will not have taken part in the movement) will therefore be very emphatically ranged against those on whom rests the responsi- bility for a prolongation of the conflict. But this opinion will not fix the responsibility on the capi- talist class and will not condemn it with any force, unless the justice of the strikers' claims and the possibility of satisfying them immediately have been clearly demonstrated by an ardent and serious propaganda. It will then express itself against the selfishness of the great owners, the routine or the selfishness of public authorities, and the general strike will result in a notable success. On the contrary, if the neutral masses have not been prepared beforehand and partly won over, they will decide against the strikers. And as no force, even a revolutionary one, can hold out against the public opinion of the whole of the nation, the working class will suffer a widespread defeat.

Finally, I say that if the general strike is con-

Strike and Revolution m

ceived and comes before the public, not in the form of a wider and more perfectly organised ex- ercise of the legal right to strike, but as the fore- runner of a movement of revolutionary violence, it will at once set up a reactionary movement of fear which the more intelligent fraction of the proletariat will not be able to resist.

There is, however, another conception attached to the general strike by some of the theorisers on the subject. They think that the general strike of the most important trades would be enough to bring on the Social Revolution, that is, the fall of the whole capitalist system, and the establish- ment of democratic and proletarian Communism. The economic life of the country would be sus- pended, railroads would be deserted, the coal necessary for industry would remain buried un- derground; steamers could not even get in to the docks, where no workmen would unload the mer- chandise. Everywhere there would be a stoppage in circulation and in production. Naturally great discomfort would result. The workers, in stop- ping exchange and production, would be starving themselves, and would therefore be forced to adopt violent methods in order to live. They would seize food and other provisions wherever they could lay hands on them. The privileged classes, threatened alike in their persons and possessions, would be shocked and frightened by the inevita- ble anger ot the proletariat, whose time-honoured

112 Studies in Socialism

suffering would be intensified by the crisis of mis- ery and hunger. Hence would come inevitable conflicts between the working class and the panic- stricken guardians of the capitalist system. At the end of a few days, then, the general strike would become purely revolutionary in character. And as the capitalist power would be scattered by the very necessity of keeping watch over such a varied and widespread movement, as the army of repression would be scattered and submerged in the flood, the proletariat would be able to over- come the obstacle against which it had heretofore only beat itself in vain, and, master of the social system at last, would install labour as sovereign.

That is the idea. I do not say that it is as clear as that in the minds of all theorisers on the subject of the general strike. I do not say that all who acclaim it attach the whole of this mean- ing to it. But I do say that for those who see in it the decisive means of liberation, it has that meaning or none.

Well, given this revolutionary meaning, I think the ideal is a false one. First, a tactical movement is especially dangerous when it cannot fail a single time without involving an immense disaster for the whole working class.

The partisans of the general strike, taking the words in this sense, are obliged — understand this clearly — to succeed the first time. If a general strike fails, after having had recourse to revolu- tionary violence, it will have left the capitalist

Strike and Revolution 113

system intact and armed it with implacable fury. The fear of the ruling classes, and even of a great part of the masses, will express itself in a long succession of reactionary years. And the prole- tariat will be disarmed, bound, and crushed, for an indefinite period.

But is there, under these conditions, a chance of success ? I think not. In the first place the working class would not rouse itself to action in defence of a general formula, such as the advent of Communism would be. The idea of Social Revolution in the abstract would not be enough to animate them. The Socialistic idea, the Com- munist idea, is strong to guide and co-ordinate successive efforts on the part of the proletariat. It is toward the accomplishment of that end, to- wards its gradual realisation, that the proletariat is directing its organised efibrt. But if a great movement is to be started, it is essential tha^^ the idea of Social Revolution should be embodied in specific claims.

To bring the working class to the point of leav- ing the factories and of beginning a battle to the death with all the powers of the present social system, a battle full of uncertainty and peril, it is not enough to cry " Communism ! " because the proletarians will immediately say, " Which Com- munism?" and "What form will it assume to-morrow if we win ? ' '

Great movements are never set on foot for the

114 Studies in Socialism

attainment of remote and vaguely understood ends. They need something solid to work for: they demand a clearly defined, specific issue.

The most practical representatives of the theory of the general strike are perfectly aware of this. They propose to rouse the working class to action in the first place by certain definite claims. And they hope that this movement, when it has be- come revolutionary in character, as it is certain to do, will expand naturally into a complete Com- munism.

But precisely here lies the essential viciousness of this policy. // is a trick to eyitrap the working classes. It proposes to drag them in by an irre- sistible mechanical action, far deeper than the original programme would have given them any reason to suspect. By the attraction of certain concrete, definite, immediate reforms they are to be led to decide on the great operation of a uni- versal strike, and it is supposed that once they have become involved in the network of the ma- chine they will be conveyed almost automatically to the Communist Revolution.

Now I maintain that in a democracy this is contrary to the whole spirit of the Revolution. I say that there can only be a Revolution where there is self-consciousness, and that those who construct an elaborate mechanical contrivance to convey the proletariat to the Revolution, almost without its being aware of what is happening, and fancy that they can lead it to the point desired by

Strike and Revolution 115

a sort of surprise, are going in a direction quite opposite to the real revolutionary tendency.

If the working class is not fully and definitely warned at the outset that it is going on strike for the whole Communist Revolution; if, when it leaves the mines, the railroads, the factories, the yards, it does not know that it is not to re-enter them until it has accomplished the whole Social Revolution; if it is not prepared and resolved to the very centre of its being, and from the very beginning, it will be upset during the progress of the movement by the tardy revelation of a pro- gramme that was not submitted to its decision before the initial action was taken. And no arti- fice, no conjurer's trick, will be able to substitute the hidden aim suddenly discovered for the aim that had been avowed at the outset.

To delude oneself into imagining that a social revolution can result from a misunderstanding, and that the proletariat can be led on beyond its depth is, if I may be permitted to use the word, pure childishness. The transformation of all so- cial relations cannot be the result of a manoeuvre.

And if on the other hand the working class is prepared beforehand, if it is told in so many words that it is leaving its work not to go back until it has abolished capitalism, it will be warned by in- stinct and reflection alike that a society as com- plicated as ours is not revolutionised by a popular rising of a few days' duration, but by an immense continuous effort of organisation and transforma-

ii6 Studies in Socialism

tion. From that moment it will shrink back from an enterprise so vague and chimerical as one would shrink from an abyss.

There is still another trick in the tactics pro- posed by the upholders of a revolutionary general strike. Some of tlicm say : "Perhaps it would not be very easy to draw the proletariat into a deliberately violent movement. It has lost the habit of that sort of thing during the last thirty years, and might not throw itself in instantly, at a signal from the militant organisations. The strike, on the other hand, is a perfectly familiar practice of the working class, and the field of ac- tion of strikes is becoming more and more ex- tended. It would therefore be an easy matter to get the working class to take part in a general strike. In the beginning, this would be only a simple extension of its ordinary habits of warfare. Besides, — and this is an important point, — it would be a perfectly legal movement. The law permits strikes; it does not and cannot assign any limit to their action. Consequently the proletariat, in declaring a general strike, would know that it was within its legal rights, and would go into the movement in the strength of that knowledge. Many workmen who would have been shocked at the premeditated use of force and at deliberate revolutionary action, would not hesitate to show their irritation with social injustice by a move- ment which would be a menace, but would not

Strike and Revolution 1 1 7

put them outside the bounds of law in the very beginning and before their blood was up.

"Moreover, the preventative repressive meas- ures of capitalism, if one may use the expression, are made impossible by the legal form that the movement would adopt at the beginning. But little by little, this general strike, this strike of a whole class, will necessarily become a great social battle, a revolutionary combat. The spirit of the working people will be roused and their just anger inflamed by suffering, misery, and the inevitable conflicts that will bring capital and labour to grapple all along the line. Even that part of the proletariat that, before the strike was on, would have shrunk from a systematic use of force, will be gradually wrought up to the proper revo- lutionary heat by the fire of events, by the battle itself and the sufferings it entails. Then we can count on an explosion of the old order,"

If we look at the essential points of the theory and the hope of a certain number of those who see in the general strike an instrument of revolu- tion, we shall see that the above is a true repre- sentation of their attitude. In their minds the general strike is a method of revolutionarj' train- ing applied to a proletariat too much of whose power would remain inert without the brutal excitement of events.

They do not any longer say to the wage-earner, "Take up your gun." But they think that the general strike, perfectly legal in its beginnings.

ii8 Studies in Socialism

will very quickly be led to arming itself with its gun or any other violent weapon that comes to hand. As a matter of fact, then, they count on the revolutionary force of events to supplement or complete the insufficient revolutionary force of men.

I have a perfect right to say that this is a revo- lutionary trick. And like every machine that has not been tested by repeated experiments be- fore it is put to a decisive use, this one is bound to disillusionise in many ways those confiding men who expect the greatest results from it. To work up by artificial means a revolutionary ex- citement which the ordinary action of suffering, misery, and injustice has not been strong enough to produce, is a very hazardous enterprise.

It has been said that revolutions are not de- creed. It may be said with still greater truth that they cannot be manufactured; and that no machinery of conflict, no matter how vast or how ingenious, can replace the revolutionary prepara- tion of events and men's minds. It will not do first to postulate the general strike and then ex- pect the Revolution to succeed as an inevitable consequence. It is perfectly possible that the proletariat, needing as they do the pretext and even the illusion of legality to lure them into the movement in the beginning, will shrink from the use of force when the pretext is unmasked and the illusion vanished. The die cast into the air may possibly fall on the side of violence; it may

Strike and Revolution 119

also fall on the side of inertia. Now, the dice- box cannot be held in the hand for long, or the game begun again an indefinite number of times. At all events it is possible that there will be a great deal of haziness, confusion, and contradiction in this movement, the leaders of which will have counted more on the unconscious and obscure force of events than on the resolute force of indi- vidual consciousness. At one point, the conflict may, as expected, result in a revolutionary move- ment; at another it will keep its legal form and be extinguished in inaction. The revolutionary movement, lacking that basis and solid founda- tion which the deliberate free-will of men alone can give, will be delivered into the power of local events, and the machinery of revolution will not take hold everywhere in the same way. Hence will come discord, discouragement, and defeat. It is perfectly true historically that events which were at first limited in scope and harmless in ap- pearance have resulted in vast and unforeseen conclusions. But it is utterly impossible to rely on this growth, and there is no known process, not even the general strike, which can inevitably produce the Revolution as an outcome of a move- ment whose beginnings were legal.

Moreover, — and this is an especial illusion of many militant Socialists, — it has not been proved at all that the general strike, even if it does take on a revolutionary character, will force the

I20 Studies in Socialism

capitalist system to capitulate. Bourgeois society will set up a resistance proportional to the mag- nitude of the interests at stake. In other words, to a revolutionary general strike that will require of it the sacrifice of its very existence, it will op- pose a resistance up to the limit of its powers.

Now, neither a stoppage of production and transportation, nor even extended violence to property and persons, is enough to bring about the overthrow of a society. No matter how powerful one supposes the effects of a general revolutionary strike to be, they can hardly exceed those of great wars and great invasions. Great wars, too, put a stop to or very much upset pro- duction, suspend or hinder trafiic, and throw all economic life into a confusion which one might suppose fatal. Notwithstanding all this, societies resist these almost deadly crises, these apparently insuperable evils, with the most extraordinary vitality.

I am not speaking of the Hundred Years' War in France, or the Thirty Years' War in Ger- many. Then society kept its form in spite of unheard-of trials, — brigandage, sieges, famines, burnings, perpetual fighting and ravaging of whole tracts of country. But in more modern societies, in bourgeois society itself, what pro- digious upheavals! Since the last half of 1793 the society that was the creation of the Revolu- tion has suffered and has even inflicted on itself in its ov/n defence injuries that doubtless no gen-

Strike and Revolution 121

eral strike can equal. A considerable proportion of the most useful part of the population, one million five hundred thousand men out of a popu- lation of twenty-five millions, are torn from the fields and workshops and thrown to the frontiers. Civil war is raging at the same time as foreign war. The Vendée, Brittany, the South, Lyons, are up and in flames. One half of France is in arms against the other half. A dry and very hot summer has brought a poor harvest. Wheat does not circulate easily, each district wishing to keep for itself as much grain as possible. Although Paris is not invested it is subjected to a real state of siege: the people have to stand in line at the door of the bakeshops, regular rations are estab- lished; bread is rare. The depreciation of paper money throws all transactions into confusion . But in spite of all these difficulties France keeps enough vital force, revolutionary society has enough spring left, first to defend itself and later to take up offen- sive tactics again. One can take a city by famine and by force; but a whole society is not captured by these means. It has to deliver itself.

In 1870-71 one third of France is occupied by the enemy; Paris is besieged; civil war follows upon foreign; a formidable indemnity is imposed on the nation, but notwithstanding all this the deep springs of life are not touched, and the mo- ment peace is declared they gush forth again in marvellous abundance.

122 Studies in Socialism

And even supposing that a general revolution- ary strike does succeed in closing all ports, in immobilising all locomotives, in destroying rail- roads, even in occupying as sovereign certain regions that are especially given over to the labouring class, and in menacing and reducing the food-supply of certain great cities and of the capital; in spite of all this, necessity, so ingenious in the face of difiSculties, will bring innumerable new resources to light. Consumption and the social life of the community will if necessary be enormously reduced, and human nature will ac- commodate itself to tragic privations, just as at the end of a siege it accommodates itself to a regime the bare idea of which, a few months be- fore, would have made the bravest man tremble. And if bourgeois society and private property will not give way, if the great majority of citizens is opposed to the new social order that the general strike wishes to install by a coup de surprise, then bourgeois society and private property will find a way to live, to defend themselves, and gradually to rally the forces of conservatism and reaction, even in the confusion and disorder of economic life.

Some imagine, it is true, that the general strike, breaking out at many points simultaneously, would oblige the capitalist and proprietary gov- ernment to spread its armed force over such a large area that it would be practically absorbed by the Revolution. This conception is extremely

Strike and Revolution 123

ingenuous. The bourgeois government would devote itself first of all to the protection of the public authorities, the assemblies, in which, by the will of the majority itself, legal power would reside. If they could not do everything at once, they would abandon if necessary the railroads and the regions where the Revolution was best organised to the strikers; they would give their attention to the concentration of their forces and, backed by the enormous prestige that the will of the legal representatives of the nation would give, they would not hesitate to strike some heavy blow, and would then re-occupy the regions abandoned in the first instance and re-establish communications, just as they are re-established in a few days in a country that an enemy has re- cently evacuated after tearing up the railroads and destroying the bridges. Even if Paris were for a moment lost to the authorities, as it was in 187 1, — and, considering the different social ele- ments of which Paris is composed, this cannot be taken for granted, — it would be enough for them to have a meeting-place and to wait in safety, as the King of France waited at Bourges, and M. Thiers at Versailles, the entry of the conservative forces. And they would enter of their own ac- cord without delay. No one should forget that, with the shooting clubs and gymnasiums that are so much under reactionary influence, the habits of outdoor sports so fashionable in the upper and middle classes, and the military training of the

124 Studies in Socialism

proprietary classes, these proprietors, the capital- ists both great and small, and the angry shop- keepers would be capable even of a very vigorous use of force.

And what would the Revolution be doing all this time ? In those regions where it would have seemed victorious at first, it would only be able to eat its heart out on the spot, and exhaust itself in useless violence. The liberal revolutions of 1830 and 1848 had a very definite end in view — to over- throw the existing government and to replace it. The revolutionary blows of Blanqui were always calculated to strike at the head and heart. He did not waste his strength; on the contrary, he concentrated it to attack one or two vital parts of the political system of government.

The revolutionary method of the general strike is the exact opposite. Precisely because it gives an economic turn to the combat in the beginning, it does not supply the working-class forces with a single central aim on which they can unite. They will stay on the spot, at the mouth of the deserted pit, on the threshold of the abandoned factory. Or if the proletarians take possession of the mine and the factory, it will be a perfectly fictitious ownership. They will be embracing a corpse, for the mines and factories will be no better than dead bodies while economic circula- tion is suspended and production is stopped. So long as a class does not own and govern the

Strike and Revolution 125

whole social machine, it can seize a few factories and yards if it wants to, but it really possesses nothing. To hold in one's hands a few pebbles of a deserted road is not to be master of trans- portation.

Destruction will be the only resource open to the working class, astonished as it will be at its powerlessness in the midst of an apparent victory. But what good would acts of destruction accom- plish except to give a savage character to the rising of the proletariat ? Observe that the tactics of a general strike have for their object and do indeed result in the decomposition, the infinite subdivision of economic life. To stop the loco- motives, tie up the steamers, and deprive industry of coal, is to substitute the scattered life of in- numerable local groups for the unified and gen- eral life of the nation. Now this cutting-up and subdivision of life is exactly counter to the Revolution.

The bourgeois Revolution was accomplished by groups that drew closer and closer together with Paris as a central bond. Every great revolution presupposes an exaltation of life, and this exaltation is only possible when there is that consciousness of unity produced by the ardent intercommunication of strength and enthusiasm. And the proletariat will accomplish its revolution by the organisation, both in the political and economic world, of strong class representation and class action, which will penetrate and bind

126 Studies in Socialism

together all phases of their life. Division is a return to feudalism. The stoppage of transporta- tion proposed by the supporters of the general strike would force society to revert to the con- ditions of an inferior civilisation.

We should see isolated groups gathered pas- sively about the oligarchical owners and depend- ent on them for their supply of the accumulated means of subsistence. The rich would be tempo- rary kings, social chiefs, and feudal lords in many country districts and small towns. And little by little, all these small sovereignties and tiny oligarchies would co-ordinate their strength to surround and crush the motionless and shame- faced Revolution, that, thinking to deprive the Government of all means of communication, would have succeeded only in isolating and breaking up its own forces.

It is, then, perfectly chimerical to hope that the revolutionary tactics of a general strike would enable even a bold, self-conscious, and active pro- letarian minority to quicken the march of events by force. No trick, no machinery of surprise, can free Socialism from the necessity of winning over the majority of the nation by propaganda and legal methods.

Does this mean that the idea of a general strike is useless, that it is a negligible quantity in the vast social movement ? Not for a- moment. In the first place, I have already shown under what

Strike and Revolution 127

conditions and in what form it could hasten social evolution and the advancement of the cause of labour. In the second place, that such an idea could have appealed to any class as a possible means of liberation ought to be a terrible and de- cisive warning to society. What! the working class is the main supporter of the whole social order; it is the creator, the producer. If it stops, then everything stops. And one might speak of it in the magnificent phrase that Mirabeau, the first prophet of the general strike, used of the Third Estate, still united then as workmen and bourgeois. " Take care," he cried to the privi- leged classes, " do not irritate this people, that produces everything, and that, to make itself for- midable, has only to become motionless."

The owning and governing class has as yet learned to surrender too small a part of real power to this proletariat, the possessor of such formida- ble negative force, which at any moment it may be tempted to use. The owners have given, or rather they have allowed the working class to retain, so small a measure of confidence in the efficacy of legal evolution, that this class is fascin- ated more and more by the idea of refusing to work at all. Labour dreaming of refusing its service, the heart meditating stopping; that is the profound internal crisis to which we have been brought by the selfishness and blindness of the privileged classes, the absence of any definite plan of action on our part. Toward this abyss of

128 Studies in Socialism

a revolutionary general strike the proletariat is feeling itself more and more drawn, at the risk not only of ruining itself should it fall over, but of dragging down with it for years to come either the wealth or the security of the national life.

The general strike, quite powerless as a revo- lutionary method, is none the less in its very idea a revolutionary index of the highest importance. It is a prodigious warning to the privileged classes, rather than a means of liberation for the exploited classes. It is a dull menace in the very heart of capitalist society that, even if it comes to nothing in the end but an impotent outburst, is witness to an organic disorder that can only be healed by a great transformation.

Finally, if the governing class were mad enough to lay hands on the poor liberties that have been won, the wretchedly insufficient means of action of the proletariat, if they threatened or attacked universal suffrage, if by the persecution of em- ployers and the police they made the right to unite in trades-unions and the right to strike empty forms, then a violent general strike would be certainly the form that a labour revolt would take, it would be their final and desperate re- course, more as a means of injuring the enemy than of saving themselves.

But the working class would be the dupe of a fatal illusion and a sort of unhealthy obsession if it mistook what can be only the tactics of despair

Strike and Revolution 129

for a method of revolution. Apart from those convulsive upheavals that escape all forecast and are sometimes the final supreme resource of history brought to bay, there is only one sovereign method for Socialism — the conquest of a legal majority.

XIII THE QUESTION OF METHOD

The Socialist party is split into factions at the present time/ and I might be accused of dream- ing of a " mystic union " if I were to say that these divisions were really only superficial. I do not think that they are irreconcilable, but that they come from serious differences of opinion, or rather from serious misconceptions, in regard to the method to be pursued. It is the very devel- opment of our party, the growing power of our idea, — I must be forgivin this optimistic back- sliding,— that have created these differences of opinion by forcing us all to offer some solution to the question of method. How shall Socialism be realised ? That is a problem we cannot evade ; and to make vague and uncertain answers is to evade it. Or, on the other hand, if we bring for- ward in I go I the answers of our predecessors and our masters of fifty years ago, we deceive ourselves.

There is one undoubted fact which transcends

' Written in 1901. The party was reunited in 1905. See Introduction.

130

The Question of Method 131

all others. This is that the proletariat is growing in numbers, in solidarity, and in self-conscious- ness. The wage-earning and the salaried classes, having increased in numbers and organised into groups, have now attained to an ideal. They no longer limit their hopes to the abolition of the worst faults of the present society; they now wish to create a social order founded on an altogether different principle. Instead of the regime of pri- vate and capitalistic ownership of property, under which it is possible for one part of mankind to lord it over the other part, they wish to institute a system of universal social co-operation which shall make of every man a legal partner. Their thought has broken away from bourgeois thought, their action from bourgeois action. They have their own organisation which they put at the serv- ice of their Communist ideal. This is a class organisation based on the growing power of the trades-unions and the workmen's co-operative societies, and the increasing share of strictly po- litical power that they have obtained in the State or over the State. All Socialists agree to this general and elementary conception of the situa- tion. They may assign different reasons for the growth of the proletariat, or rather they may lay different stress on the same reasons. They may magnify either the power of economic organisa- tion or of political activity. But they all realise that by the necessary evolution of capital that is developed by modern industry, and by the corre-

132 Studies in Socialism

spending action of the proletariat, this class has gained an indefinitely increasing power which is called upon to transform the very system of owner- ship itself.

Socialists differ also about the scope and form that the class action of the proletariat should take. Some think that it ought to be involved as little as possible in the conflicts of the social organisa- tion it is to destroy, and that all its energy should be reserved for the final act by which society shall be liberated. Others hold that it ought to exer- cise its great human function from now on. At the Socialist Congress held recently at Vienna, Kaustky ' brought up the famous saying of Las- salle : ' ' The Proletariat is the rock on which the Church of the future shall be built." And he added: " The Proletariat is not only that. It is also the rock against which, from now on, the reactionary forces will dash themselves and be broken. ' ' And for my part I say that it is not only a rock, in other words, a compact and motionless force of resistance; it is a vast force, united in- deed, but active, which can mingle in all great movements without being dispersed, and which grows in strength and energy by its contact with the life of the whole. But all of us, no matter what scope or importance we assign to the class- activity of the proletariat, regard it as an auto-

• Kaustky is one of the leading Marxists, and editor of Die neue Zeit, the oflficial review of the German party.

The Question of Method 133

nomous power, which can co-operate with other powers, but is never absorbed by them, and always keeps its own special character for its separate and superior task.

To Marx belongs the merit, perhaps the only one of all attributed to him that has fully with- stood the trying tests of criticism and of time, of having drawn together and unified the labour movement and the Socialist idea. In the first third of the nineteenth century labour struggled and fought against the crushing power of capital; but it was not conscious icself toward what end it was straining; it did not know that the true ob- jective of its effort was the common ownership of property. And, on the other hand. Socialism did not know that the labour movement was the liv- ing form in which its spirit was embodied, the concrete practical force of which it stood in need. Marx was the most clearly convinced and the most powerful among those who put an end to the empiricism of the labour movement and the Utopianism of the Socialist thought, and this should always be remembered to his credit. By a crowning application of the Hegelian method, he united the Idea and the Fact, thought and history. He enriched the practical movement by the idea, and to the theory he added practice : he brought the Socialist thought into proletarian life, and proletarian life into Socialist thought. From that time on, Socialism and the proletariat became inseparable. Socialism can only realise its ideal

134 Studies in Socialism

through the victory of the proletariat, and the proletariat can only complete its being through the victory of Socialism,

To the ever more pressing question, " How shall Socialism be realised?" we must then give the preliminary answer, " By the growth of the proletariat to which it is inseparably joined." This is the first and essential answer; and who- ever refuses to accept it wholly and in its true sense necessarily places himself outside of Social- ist life and thought. And this answer, vague though it is, is not empty of meaning, because it implies the obligation of each one of us to be dili- gent in helping forward to our utmost the thought, the organisation, the activity, and the life of the labouring classes. Indeed, in a certain sense, this answer is the only sure one. For it is im- possible for us to know with any certainty by ex- actly what means, in what manner, and at what moment, our political and social evolution will reach the Communist ideal. But what is certain is that the evolution is hastened, the forward movement vivified, enlarged, and deepened by everything that increases the intellectual, eco- nomic, and political power of the proletariat.

But this first answer, important and valid as it is, is not a sufiBcient one. Because the proletariat has already grown in numbers and force and be- cause it has begun to make its power felt in the machinery of economics and politics, for that very reason the question arises, " What shall be the

The Question of Method 135

mechanism by which the coming victory shall be obtained?" In proportion as the proletarian power increases in self-consciousness it becomes embodied in definite forms ; in universal suffrage, in trades-unions, co-operative societies, and the various branches of the public service in the democratic State And we cannot treat the power of the proletariat apart from the forms in which it has already organised itself, the machinery that it has already partially adapted to its own uses. We have, then, reached the time when it is no longer Utopian to try to find out with a certain amount of precision what method the growing Socialist idea will adopt to bring about its com- plete realisation. To ask this is not to separate ourselves from the life of the proletariat, by re- turning to the realm of Utopian conjecture; it is, on the contrary, to bind ourselves more closely to that life, to grow with it, to become more fixed in our ideas as it defines itself more and more clearly. For that life is no longer " the spirit moving over the face of the waters " ; it is already incorporated in institutions, both economic and political (universal suffrage, democracy, trades- unions, co-operative societies), that have reached a definite stage of development and acquired a power and a policy; and it behooves us to know whether the Communism of the proletariat can be realised by these means, or whether, on the other hand, it can only be brought about by a decisive rupture with existing institutions.

136 Studies in Socialism

To tell the truth, Socialists have always tried to foresee and predetermine the form and the his- torical setting of the ultimate triumph of Social- ism. And the reason for our present disquiet, for the sense of uncertainty and unrest that op- presses our party, is that the needs of a new era, hardly formulated as yet, are still mingled in one confused mass with the partly outgrown theories of action bequeathed to us by our masters.

Marx and Blauqui both believed that the prole- tariat would seize the power by means of a revo- lution. But of the two, Marx's thought is much the more complex. His revolutionary method was many-sided, and it is therefore his concep- tion that I wish particularly to discuss. It is the result of worn-out historical hypotheses, or of inexact economic hypotheses.

In the first place, Marx's mind was full of memories of the French Revolution, and of the other revolutions in France and Europe that were a prolongation of the first. The trait that all the revolutionary movements, from 1789 to 1796, and from 1830 to 1848, had in common was that they were revolutionary movements of bourgeois origin in which the working class joined and beyond which it wished to go. In all that long period the working class was not strong enough to at- tempt a revolution for its own benefit; neither was it strong enough to take the leadership of the revolution little by little according to the new legal means at his disposal. Two things, how-

The Question of Method 137

ever, it could and did do. First, it tried its strength, and increased it, by joining in all the revolutionary movements; it took advantage of the dangers that the new order had to face, threatened as it was by all the reactionary ele- ments, to become a power whose support was necessary to that order. In the second place, when it had grown in power and importance, when hope and ambition were stirring in the hearts of the proletariat, when the different revo- lutionary factions of the bourgeoisie were ex- hausted or discredited by their internal dissen- sions, the working class tried to take possession of the revolution and turn it to its own uses, by a sort of co2ip de surprise. Thus, in the French Revolution in 1793, the Parisian proletariat made itself felt in the Convention by means of the Commune, and sometimes even exercised a sort of dictatorship. Thus, a little later, Babeuf and his friends tried to seize the revolutionary power by a sudden and unexpected move for the benefit of the working class. Thus again after 1830 the French proletariat, after having played in the July Revolution the great part noted by Armand Carrel, tried to urge on the victorious bourgeoisie and by and by to outstrip it.

It was this rhythm of revolution that at first cap- tured the imagination of Marx. Certainlj' he knew very well, when in November, 1847, ^^ wrote the Conijnunist Manifesto with Kngels, that the prole- tariat had grown; he looked upon it as the true

138 Studies in Socialism

revolutionary power; and it was against the bour- geoisie that the Revolution was to be undertaken.

He writes: " The development of industry of which the middle class, without either premedita- tion or resistance, has become the agent, far from maintaining the workers in the isolated situation of competitors, has brought about their revolu- tionary solidarity by forcing them to become as- sociates for a common end. Thus the growth of Modern Industry cuts at the very foundations of that system of production and appropriation of the products on which the bourgeoisie depends. The bourgeoisie is manufacturing as its chief product its own grave-diggers. Its ruin and the triumph of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

And again: "The immediate object of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: the organisation of the prole- tariat as a class, the overthrow of bourgeois su- premacy, and the conquest of political power by the proletariat." And here again is a very definite statement: " We have followed the more or less veiled civil war raging within our present society to the point where that war will break out into open revolution, and where by the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie the proletariat will establish its dominion." It is, then, by a violent revolution against the middle class that the working class is to grasp the power and realise Communism. But at the same time it seems to Marx that the signal for the struggle is to come

The Question of Method 139

from the bourgeoisie itself, which has still to complete its own revolution. The bourgeoisie will strike at absolutism, or what there is left of it, at feudalism or its remnants; and when it has given the preliminary impetus, by setting free the forces that bring about crises, the proletariat, more powerful to-day than the Levellers of Lil- burne in the English Revolution of 1648, or the proletarians of Chaumette in 1793, will take pos- session in a revolutionary manner of the bour- geois revolution. It will begin by fighting side by side with the bourgeoisie, but as soon as the latter becomes victorious, it will expropriate it of the fruits of victory.

" In Germany," Marx and Engels wrote in 1847, " the Communist party will fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it takes up its revolutionary rôle again; it will join with it in combating ab- solute monarchy, feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie. But it will never cease for a single instant to rouse among the workers the clearest possible consciousness of the antagonism that exists between the bourgeoisie and the prole- tariat, and makes them enemies. The social and political conditions that will accompany the tri- umph of the bourgeoisie are so many weapons which the German workman will know how to turn against the bourgeoisie itself. After the downfall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie must be begun without delay.

I40 Studies in Socialism

" On Germany especially the eyes of all Com- munists will be fixed, because Germany is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution, which will be car- ried out under conditions of general European civilisation and of proletarian development un- known either in the England of the seventeenth century or the France of the eighteenth. The bourgeois revolution, then, will necessarily be the immediate prelude to the proletarian revolution."

Thus we see that the proletarian revolution is to be grafted on to a victorious bourgeois revolu- tion. Marx's mind, delicately ironical and even sarcastic in tone, amused itself with these tricks of thought. The idea that History was to make sport of the middle class by snatching the spoils of victory still warm from their hands, gave him a bitter sort of joy. But it was a scheme of revo- lution too complicated and contradictory. In the first place, if the proletariat is not strong enough to give the signal for the Revolution itself, if it is obliged to depend on the fortunate chances of the bourgeois revolution, how are we to be certain that it will have more strength to oppose to the victorious bourgeoisie than it had before the movement began ? Two contingencies will arise. Either the bourgeoisie will be defeated in its at- tempt at revolt against the old world of feudalism and absolute power, and the proletariat will be overwhelmed long before it has had a chance to fight for its own hand; or else the bourgeoisie will succeed, it will abolish the arbitrary power

The Question of Method 141

of kings, do away with feudal property, break the shackles of the guild system, and will then throw itself with so much new life and enthusiasm into the new opportunities it has conquered for itself, that the proletariat will be utterly incapable of creating another and opposing movement. Even if it acts by violence and surprise, even if it tries to organise a " dictatorship" and to " con- quer the democracy ' ' by force, its real power cannot be artificially raised above the level where it was before the bourgeois revolution began.

Miguel was clear-sighted when he wrote to Marx in his famous letter of 1850, foreseeing a continuation of the Revolution : " The labour party may succeed against the upper middle-class and what remains of the feudal element, but it will be attacked in the flank by the democracy. We can perhaps give an anti-bourgeois tone to the Revolution for a little while, we can destroy the essential conditions of bourgeois production; but we can't possibly put down the small trades- people and shopkeeping class, the petty bour- geoisie. My motto is to secure all we can get. We ought to prevent the lower and middle class from forming any organisation for as long a time as possible after the first victory, and especially to oppose ourselves in vSerried ranks to the scheme of calling a constitutional assembly. Partial ter- rorism, local anarchy, must replace for us what we lack in bulk."

But a lack of bulk is not replaced in this fashion.

142 Studies in Socialism

It is perfectly certain that when a class is not historically ready, when it cannot act till those whom it aspires to replace have given the signal, and when its revolution, borrowing power from the movement of its enemy, cannot be called any- thing but a parasite revolution, it must continue the revolutionary movements permanently, and keep all the elements of society in continual agi- tation if it is to attain even a partial success. But this policy only results in giving time and oppor- tunit}'' to the reactionary element that will over- whelm proletariat and bourgeoisie together. These are the tactics to which the working class is condemned while it is still in the period of in- sufiScient preparation. And if one of the char- acteristics of that Socialism which may be called Utopian is to have planned a course of action without depending on the power of labour itself and labour only, the Cominunist Manifesto of Marx and Engels is still to be counted as a pro- duction of that Utopian period. Robert Owen and Fourier counted on the good- will of the upper classes, while Marx and Engels awaited the happy fortune of a middle-class revolution, to accomplish their end. The propositions laid down in the Manifesto are not those of a class sure of itself, whose hour has struck at last; they are, on the contrary, the revolutionary expedients of an impatient and feeble class, that wishes to force forward by strategy the progress of events. And even after this paradoxical effort, this

The Question of Method 143

proletarian distortion of the borgeois revolution, Marx does not foresee a complete victory of the proletariat and Communism; he looks for an ex- traordinary combination of Capitalist and Com- munist ownership, of violence to property and organisation of credit. Here is a singular fact : after having maintained that it is to the evolution of industry and the growth of the industrial pro- letariat that the revolutionary power owes its very existence, the Manifesto only plans as the first move of the victorious Communist Revolution, the expropriation of the income from land! In this Marx is less advanced than Babeuf, whose glory it is to have brought industrial, as well as agricultural, production within the scope of Com- munist action. His position is almost that of St. Just, who seems to have foreseen the possibility of the nation's absorbing the rent of farms. " We have seen above," says Marx, " that the first measure of the working class will be to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to capture the democratic régime.

' ' The proletariat will make use of its political supremacy to wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all the means of produc- tion in the hands of the State, viz., the proletariat organised into a ruling class, and to increase as quickly as possible the total of productive forces of which use can be made.

"It is evident that this policy implies at the outset despotic inroads on the rights of private

144 Studies in Socialism

property and on the conditions of bourgeois pro- duction. Measures must be taken which will at first appear economically insuflScient and can- not be regarded as permanent, but which, once the movement is under way, will lead to new measures, and be indispensable as a means of revolutionising the whole system of production. These measures, obviously, will be different in the different countries. Nevertheless the following will be generally applicable, at least in the most advanced countries: (i) Abolition of property in land ; application of all rents of land to public purposes. (2) A heavy progressive or graduated income tax, (3) Abolition of all right of inherit- ance. (4) Confiscation of the goods of all rebels and those who have left the country, (5) Cen- tralisation of credit in the hands of the State by means of a National Bank founded on State capital and with an exclusive monopoly. (6) Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. (7) Exten- sion of factories and means of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of fertile lands generally, in accordance with a com- mon plan. (8) Obligatory labour for all; or- ganisation of industrial armies, especially for agricultural purposes. (9) Combination of agri- culture with manufacturing industries, prepara- tion of all measures looking toward the progressive disappearance of the distinction between town and country. (10) Free public education of all

The Question of Method 145

children ; abolition of the present system of child labour in factories. Combination of edu- cation with industrial production, etc."

An extraordinary programme, in which are united the agrarian Communism of the eighteenth century and some of the elements of what we should call to-day the programme of St. Mandé. In the industrial world, Marx and Engels content themselves at first with the nationalisation of the railroads; they do not even suggest the national- isation of the mines, which is accepted to-day even by the Radical- Socialist party. But the phenom- enon that especially strikes me is not the chaos of the programme, with its mixture of agricultural Communism and industrial Capitalism. It is not the contradiction between the article that takes away the right of inheritance and thus deprives the new generations of personal property in in- dustrial capital, and all the articles that allow private property to exist. History shows that different and even contradictory forms have often co-existed. For example, production according to the old guild system and capitalistic production functioned side by side for a long time; all the seventeenth and all the eighteenth centuries are made up of a mixture of the two, and free farm labour and serfdom also co-existed for a long time. And I am convinced that in the revolu- tionary evolution which is to lead us to Com- munism, we shall have for a long time the juxtaposition of collectivist property, and iudi-

146 Studies in Socialism

vidualist property, of Communism and Capitalism. This is the fundamental law of great transforma- tions. Marx and Engels had a perfect right to say in 1872 that they set no great store by their 1847 programme, and this confession was by no means a recantation. " This passage now re- quires modifications in several directions. The immense industrial progress of the last twenty- five years, the parallel advance of the working class organised as a party, have superannuated more than one passage of this programme." At the most one must be astonished that they did not in 1847 assign a more important rôle to in- dustrial Communism.

But the really amazing thing is that they should have thought the proletariat strong enough to confiscate for its own advantage the bourgeois revolution, and to " capture the democracy " by a sudden stroke, and at the same time have sup- posed it incapable of fully establishing industrial Communism, even in the first flush of victory and in the most advanced countries. The most striking thing in the Manifesto is not the chaos of the programme, but the chaos of the method. By a stroke of physical force the proletariat will have established itself in power in the beginning; by a stroke of force it will have wrenched power from the revolutionary bourgeoisie. It will "cap- ture the democracy "; the fact is, in other words, that it will suspend it, .since it substitutes the dic- tatorial will of a single class for the freely con-

The Question of Method h?

suited will of the majority of the citizens. And by force again, by the power of a dictator, it will commit its first "despotic infractions" of the rights of property that the Manifesto foresees. . . , But what does all this amount to ? And supposing that the democracy is not ready for the Communist movement, will it not then take measures to annul the first dictatorial acts of the proletariat instead of carrying them out and ex- tending their scope ? But if, on the contrary, the democracy is prepared, if the proletariat can, by legal measures alone, induce it to develop the first revolutionary institutions in a communistic direction, we have in the legal conquest of the democracy the sovereign method of revolution. Every other method, I repeat, is nothing but the momentary expedient, possibly necessary for a moment, of a weak and ill-prepared class. And those modern Socialists who are still talking about " the impersonal dictatorship of the prole- tariat," or who expect a sudden seizure of power and the violation of democratic methods, are re- verting to the time when the proletariat was still a feeble element, when it was reduced to adopt artificial means of obtaining a victory.

The tactics of the Manifesto consist in altering for the benefit of the proletariat the course of those movements that it lacked the strength to originate. These are the tactics of a bold force, increasing in strength but still subordinate, and as a matter of fact they have been instinctively

148 Studies in Socialism

employed by the working class in all the crises of democratic and bourgeois society. Marx had taken up the idea of the French Revolution and Babeuf. After 1830 the labour agitations of Paris and layons prolonged the middle-class revolution by a sort of confused proletarian affirmation. In 1848 the proletariat of Paris, Berlin, and Vienna tried, for a few audacious days, to divert the Revolution in the direction of Socialism. The famous saying of Blanqui, " We do not create a movement, we divert it," is the very expression of this policy. It is the working formula of Marx's Communist Manifesto, the watchword of a class that knows itself to be still in the minority, but feels that it is called to play a great part in the future. When, in 1870, the 4th of September was followed by the 31st of October,' we have another example of the method of Marx and Blanqui. And the Commune itself, where the Socialist proletariat took such an increasingly active part that it tended to overshadow the lower middle-class democracy, was again an application of the tactics of the Manifesto— to graft the prole- tarian revolution on to the democratic and bour- geois revolution.

' The Republic of Gambetta was proclaimed on the 4th of September, the day after the news of the Emperor's defeat at Sedan reached Paris. On the 31st of October an attempt at proletarian revolution was made, but the insurrectionists had control of the Hôtel de Ville for a few hours only.

The Question of Method 149

Thus, in a hundred and twenty j-ears, the method of working-class revolution which Babeuf was the first to apply, which was given a formula by Marx and Blanqui, and which consisted in in- troducing the ideas of proletarian Communism under the cover of bourgeois revolutions, has been tried or proposed many times and under many forms. By this method the working class at several great historical crises has become con- scious of its power and its destiny. By it, the proletariat has had an opportunity to test itself in a position of partial power. By it, the problem of property and Communism has been kept imin- terruptedly before the public as a question of the day in practical European politics, according to the advice of the Manifesto: " In all these move- ments, the question that the Communists bring to the front as the essential point is that of prop- erty, even if the discussion of this question has not been fully developed at the time."

By following this policy, finally, the proletariat has taken an active part in affairs long before it had power enough to control them. But it was chimerical to hope that a proletarian Communism could be grafted on to the bourgeois revolution. It was chimerical to think that the revolutionary agitation of the bourgeoisie would give the prole- tariat the opportunity of making a permanently successful counter-stroke. As a matter of fact, these tactics have never had the desired issue. Sometimes the revolutionary bourgeoisie has

150 Studies in Socialism

failed, dragging the proletariat down with it. Sometimes the successful revolutionary bour- geoisie has had the strength to restrain and over- power the proletarian movement. And besides, even supposing that a proletarian movement had been suddenly imposed by surprise on agitations of another nature and another origin, what would have been the final result? The strictly prole- tarian movement would have quickly degenerated by a series of compromises into a movement purely democratic in character. The very utmost outcome of a victorious Commune would have been a radical Republic.

To-day the predetermined form in which Marx, Engels, and Blanqui conceived of the proletarian revolution has been eliminated by history. In the first place, the proletariat in its increased strength has ceased to count on the favourable chance of a bourgeois revolution. By its own strength and in the name of its own ideas, it wishes to influence the democracy. It is not ly- ing in wait for a bourgeois revolution in order to throw the bourgeoisie down from its revolution as one might throw a rider down so as to get posses- sion of his horse. It has its own organisation and its own power. It has a growing economic power, through its trades-unions and co-operative socie- ties. It has an indefinitely elastic legal power through universal suffrage and democratic insti- tutions. It is not reduced to being an adventur- ous and violent parasite on bourgeois revolutions.

The Question of Method 151

It is methodically preparing, or better, it is methodically beginning its own revolution, by the gradual and legal conquest ot the power of production and of the power of the State.

And indeed, if it were to wait for the opportu- nity of a middle-class revolution in order to strike its coup de force and institute a class dictatorship, it would wait in vain. The revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie is over. It is possible that in order to safeguard its economic interests and under the pressure of the working class, the middle class in Italy, Germany, and Belgium may be induced to extend the constitutional rights of the people, to claim full universal suf- frage, real parliamentary government, and fne responsibility of ministers to Parliament. It is possible that the combined action of the demo- cratic middle class and the working class will everywhere curtail the royal prerogative or the imperial autocracy to the point where monarchy has only a nominal existence. It is certain that the struggle for a complete democracy is not over in Europe, but in this struggle the bourgeoisie will have an insignificant part to play, such a part, for example, as it is now playing in Belgium.

Moreover, in all the constitutions of central and western Europe, there are already enough demo- cratic elements for the transition to real democracy to be made without a revolutionary crisis. So that the proletarian revolution cannot, as Marx and Blanqui thought, take shelter behind hour-

152 Studies in Socialism

geois revolutions; it can no longer seize and twist to its advantage the revolutionary agitations of the middle class, because these agitations are over and done with. On open ground, on the large field of democratic legality and universal suffrage, the Socialist proletariat is now preparing, en- larging, and organising its revolution. To this methodical, direct, and legal revolutionary action Bngels at the end of his life summoned the Euro- pean proletariat in famous words which, in fact, relegated the Commwiist Manifesto to the past. Henceforward, middle-class revolutionary action being over, all violent means employed by the proletariat would result only in uniting all non- proletarian forces in an opposition coalition. And that is why I have always interpreted a general strike not as a means of violent action, but as one of the most gigantic means of legal pressure that the educated and organised proletariat can bring to bear for great and definite ends.

But if the historical hypothesis on which the revolutionary conception of the Comnnaiisi Mani- festo is based is as a matter of fact vSuperannuated, if the proletariat can no longer count on the revo- lutionary movements of the bourgeoisie as a means of displaying its own revolutionary' power, if it can no longer erect its class dictatorship after a period of chaotic and violent democracy, can it at least expect its sudden installation in power as the result of an economic crash, a cataclysm of the capitalistic system, that has come at last face to

The Question of Method 153

face with the impossibility of living, and has sus- pended payment? That again was a revolution- ary perspective opened by Marx. To establish the class dictatorship of the proletariat, he de- pended both on the revolutionary political as- cendency of the bourgeoisie and on its economic downfall. Capitalism was one day to succumb of its own accord, under the increasingly intense and frequent action of the crises for which it was responsible, and the exhaustion of misery to which it would have reduced the exploited. It cannot be seriously doubted that this was the thought of Marx and Engels in the Coniinwiist Manifesto :

" Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressed and oppressing classes. But that a class may be oppressed, certain conditions must be assured under which it can at least continue to drag on its slavish existence. Under the feudal yoke, the serf, in spite of his serfdom, did manage to raise himself to membership in the commune (or village organisation) and the member of the middle class managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, instead of bettering himself with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. The workman becomes a pauper, and pauperism increases even more rapidly than either population or wealth. It is therefore perfectly clear that the bourgeoisie is unfit to be any longer

154 Studies in Socialism

the ruling class in society and to impose its class conditions on society as a ruling law. It has be- come unfit to govern because it can no longer assure to its slaves the subsistence which allows them to continue their slave-existence. It cannot help letting them sink to the condition where it has to feed them, instead of being fed by them. Society can no longer live under the rule of this bourgeoisie; that is, the existence of this bour- geoisie is no longer compatible with the life of society."

When matters have got to this pass, when boui^eois and capitalistic exploitation have ex- ceeded, if one may use the expression, the limit of the human tolerance of the exploited classes, an inevitable revolt, an irresistible rising of the people breaks out, and the civil war that is latent between the classes is finally put an end to by the " violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie."

This is a true statement of the thought of Marx and Engels at that date. I am aware that many writers and speakers try to throw a veil over the brutality of these statements. I am aware that subtle Marxist interpreters say that Marx and Bngels only meant to speak about a relative pauperisation. In the same way when theo- logians want to harmonise texts in the Bible with proved scientific truth, they say that the word " day" in Genesis means a geological period of several million years. I do not contradict them. Those are exegetical elegances and charities that

The Question of Method 155

make it possible to pass without pain from a dogma professed for many years to a better known truth. And since the 'revolutionary" spirits have need of these manipulations, who would dream of thwarting them ? Nevertheless if Marx had only meant to talk of a relative pauperisation, how would he have been able to conclude that capitalism would force its slaves down below the minimum living wage, and thus, by a series of irresistible reflexes, make it inevitable that the working class should bring on the destruction of the bourgeoisie ?

It has been said, too, that Marx and Engels only wished to define the abstract tendency of capitalism and to give a picture of what bourgeois society would become by its own law if the or- ganisation of labour did not by an inverse effort counteract the tendency of oppression and de- pression. And how, indeed, could Marx, who made the proletariat the essence and vital em- bodiment of Socialism, have failed to recognise and give value to proletarian action ? But it seems as if, in the thought of Marx, this action, although in fact ensuring certain partial economic advantages to the proletariat, was chiefly im- portant as a means of increasing its class con- sciousness by developing its sense of injury and of its own strength: " But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that

156 Studies in Socialism

strength more. The diÊferent interests and vary- ing conditions of life of the different grades of labour, within the ranks of the proletariat itself, are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and reduces wages nearly everywhere to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers constantly more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and in- dividual bourgeois take on more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combina- tions (trades-unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provisions beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.

' 'Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, 7iot in the immediate result, but in the ever- expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of

The Question of Method 157

the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, for the attain- ment of which the burghers of the Middle Ages with their miserable highwaj^s required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

" This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it always rises up again, stronger, firmer, and mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular inter- ests of the workers, by taking advantage of the internal dissensions in the bourgeoisie. Thus the ten hours' bill in England was carried." '

If I have reproduced this pleasant picture of the modern labour-movement, it is not with the object of discussing it in detail.< It w^ould be necessary to make many reservations on several points, especially that of the levelling of salaries. But I wished the reader to put to himself to some purpose the question I ask myself now: " How far did Marx admit that the economic and politi- cal organisation of the proletarians would check the tendency to pauperisation that is, according

' I have used the English translation of the Communist Manifesto authorised by Engels and published as a tract by the Social Democratic Federation. In a few minor instances I have altered the phraseology when clearness seemed to demand it.— Transi^aTOR.

158 Studies in Socialism

to him, the very law of capitalism ?" I think the answer may fairly be, " In a very feeble measure." Undoubtedly the workmen grouped as a class and a party are able to gain certain partial advantages, thanks especially to the divisions in the owning class; but it appears that their union for the fight is the only important gain that they obtain from the fight itself. A general revolt is then the ultim- ate aim that is furthered by the gain in solidarity and the power of protest of the workmen. Their chances of conducting a revolutionary movement efficiently and of hastening the downfall of the bourgeoisie are thereby increased. But in fact, in the main conditions of their actual life, they suffer under the law of proletarian pauperisation, opposing to it a too feeble counterweight. Un- doubtedly this very contradiction between the in- creasing misery endured by the proletariat, and the increasing power of claiming its rights and of decisive action that organisation was bringing about, seemed to Marx the special motive power of the approaching insurrection, the immediate force back of revolution. The concrete ameliora- tions obtained by the labour movement compen- sate imperfectly for the concrete depreciation of the labourer's standard of life under the law of capitalist production. In the conflict of tend- encies acting upon the proletariat, the depress- ing tendency has the upper hand at present. It is this more than any other that controls the real situation of the working class.

The Question of Method 159

And, since we are talking of tendencies, we may note that all the thought of Marx and Engels tended in this direction, I might almost say that Marx needed for his dialectic conception of mod- ern history a proletariat infinitely impoverished and denuded. The proletariat, to fulfil its role of " the human factor " in the Hegelian dialectic of Marx, to represent truly the idea of essential humanity, ought to be so utterly despoiled of all social rights that the quality of humanity, in- finitely distressed and wronged, alone persisted. How can one pretend to understand Marx without penetrating to the dialectic origin, the fundamen- tal basis of this thought ? His ' ' Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Rights," which appeared in 1844 in the Frarico- German Annals, is a con- clusive document in this connection. " Where," he asks, "does the practical possibility of German emancipation lie? The answer is: It lies in the formation of a class bound by Radical chains; of a class of bourgeois society that shall not be a class of bourgeois society; of a State that shall be the dissolution of all States; of a sphere that shall have a character of universality by the univers- ality of its suffering, and that lays claim to no one especial right because it is not one special in- justice but injustice as a whole that is being wreaked upon it; that can appeal to no historic title to consideration, but only to the title of hu- manity; that is not in special opposition to this or that result, but in general opposition to all th

i6o Studies in Socialism

principles of the German State; it consists finally in the formation of a sphere that can emancipate itself only by emancipating at the same time all the other spheres of society; a sphere that em- bodies the total degradation of Man and that can, in consequence, realise itself again only by the complete restoration of Man."

I am of course aware that Marx is speaking here of Germany and of the special conditions of her enfranchisement. I know that he recognised in the social classes in France a higher historic idealism; that according to him they have the habit of regarding themselves as the guardians of the general good, so that for entire emancipation to be efifected in France, it would be enough that this idealist action should pass from the bour- geoisie, whose humanitarian mission is limited and counteracted by the cares of property, to the French proletariat, in whom the humanitarian mission can develop to its full and universal sig- nificance without any obstacle.

Yes, he is dealing with Germany and the Ger- man proletariat. But who does not realise that, in spite of ethnic and historical differences, the German proletariat is, in Marx's mind, the repre- sentative and, because of the completeness of its destitution, the typical proletariat ?

It is by a Hegelian transposition of Christianity that Marx pictures the movement of modern emancipation. Just as the Christian God hum- bled himself to the lowest depth of suffering hu-

The Question of Method i6i

manity in order to redeem humanity as a whole; just as the Saviour, to save mankind, had to lower himself to a degree of destitution bordering on animality, a situation beneath which no man could fall; just as this infinite abasement of God was the condition of the infinite elevation of man, so, in the dialectic of Marx, the proletariat, the modern Saviour, had to be stripped of all guaranties, deprived of every right, degraded to the depth of social and historic annihilation, in order that by raising itself it might raise all hu- manity. And just as the Man-God, to continue his mission, had to remain poor, suffering, and humiliated until the triumphal day of the resur- rection— that single victory over death which has freed all humanity from the bonds of death for ever, — so the proletariat is only able to continue its mission in the logical scheme by bearing, until the final day of revolt — the revolutionary resur- rection of humanity, — a cross whose weight is ever increasing, the essential capitalistic law of oppres- sion and depression. Hence comes the evident difficulty that Marx experiences in accepting the idea of a partial raising of the proletariat. Hence a sort of joy he feels mixed with an element of dialectic mysticism, in summing up the crushing forces that weigh down the proletarians.'

Marx was mistaken. It was not from absolute

' It may be of interest to quote here Bebel's remarks on this subject at the Liibeck Congress in 1901. He is

102 Studies in Socialism

destitution that absolute liberation could come. Poor as the German proletariat was, it was not supremely poor. In the first place, the modern workman embodies henceforward all that part of humanity conquered by the abolition of primitive

answering the attack of Dr. David, whose arguments are practically those of Jaurès.

"The Contmutiist Manifesto has been appealed to. I affirm that already in 1872, Engels, in concert with Karl Marx, declared that they wished to republish it only as a historical document. Whoever has studied the works of Marx and Engels in detail can have no doubt that they never set up the Theory of Increasing Misery in the sense explained by David. If anything is characteristic, and refutes large passages in Bernstein's Presuppositions of Socialism, it is the passage from Capital, prefixed as a motto to Bernstein's book, in which Karl Marx describes the Ten Hours' Bill as the victory of a principle. Marx took the view that by organisation the working class can counteract the depressing tendencies of capital, and if by the strength of their organisation they succeeded in incit- ing the State to take such steps, then it was not merely a great moral advance, but the victory of a new principle. Even a man like Lassalle, who took so decidedly the standpoint of the Brazen Law of Wages, — even he gives no occasion for his being invoked as a witness on behalf of a false conception of the Theory of Increasing Misery. In his Open Letter in Reply he says : ' People tell you workers you are to-day in quite a difierent position from that of three or four hundred years ago. No doubt you are better off than the Botokudiens or than cannibal savages.' 'Every human satisfaction,' he says further on, * depends always on the relation of the means of satisfaction to what the custom of the period demands

The Question of Method 163

savagery and barbarism, by the abolition of slav- ery and serfdom. Then, however feeble at that moment were the claims of the German proletariat to a place of historic importance, they were not entirely lacking. The history of this proletariat since the French Revolution had not been an utter blank. And especially by its sympathy for the emancipatory action of the French proletariat, the workmen of the Parisian section on the 14th of July, the 5th and 6th of October, and the loth of August,' it shared in the title to historical con- sideration won by the French proletariat; a title that had become universal in character, just as the Declaration of the Rights of Man was a uni- versal symbol and as the fall of the Bastille was a universal deliverance. At the very moment when Marx was writing to the German proletariat words

as bare necessities for existence, or, which is the same thing, upon the excess of the means of satisfaction over the lowest limit of what the custom of the period demands as bare necessaries for existence.' 'If you then compare,' he suggests further, 'what the rich class has to-day with what the working class has to-day, the gap between the working class and the rich class to-day is evidently greater than ever before.' That is the pith of the Theory of Increasing Misery." — Modern Social- ism, edited by R. C. K. Ensor.

'The 14th of July, 1789, is the date of the fall of the Bastille; on the 5th and 6th of October, 1789, the people of Paris, led by the hungry women, forced the King to return from Versailles ; on the 10th of August, 1792, the Tuileries were taken.

1 64 Studies in Socialism

of mystic abasement and mystic resurrection, the German proletarians, and Marx himself among them, were turning their eyes towards France, the great country where the honourable position of the proletariat in history was first realised. But is there anything strange in the fact that Marx, with his fundamental logical conception of history, should have given precedence to the tend- ency toward depression in capitalistic evolution ? Is it astonishing that he should have written again in his Capital that " oppression, slavery, exploitation, and misery are increasing," and yet also have used the phrase, " the resistance of the labouring classes, continually growing in num- bers and discipline, united and organised by the very mechanism of capitalistic production," here again balancing a force of depression that acts immediately and a force of resistance to oppres- sion and of organisation that seems especially destined to prepare the future ?

Engels, for his part, had so strict and rigid a conception of the inflexibility of the capitalist system, of its impotence to adapt itself to the least reform, that he made the gravest and most decisive mistakes in his interpretation of social movements. It is difiBcult to imagine grosser blunders than those that he committed on every page of his celebrated book on The Situation of the Working Classes in England. He saw every- where inconsistencies, impossibilities, and in- soluble contradictions, which could only be done

The Question of Method 165

away with by revolution. In 1845 he announced as imminent and absolutely inevitable in Eng- land, a labour and Communist revolution, which was to be the bloodiest in history. The poor would butcher the rich and burn their castles. No doubt was possible on that score. " It is no- where easier to prophesy than in England, be- cause here all social developments are extremely well-defined and acute. The revolution ')nust come, it is already too late to propose a pacific solution." Strange conception of that England, always so expert in compromise and evolutionary changes ! He carried his dogmatism in social questions to such a pitch that he ended by adopt- ing toward the specific problems of the time the same tone as that of the most obstinate conserva- tives. All social and political progress under the present system seemed to him as impossible as it did to them. According to him the Chartists had got England into a corner whence the only issues were destruction on the one hand, or the complete Communist Revolution on the other. They de- manded universal suffrage, but this was irrecon- cilable with monarchy; they demanded a ten-hour day, but this was irreconcilable with the emerg- encies of production under the capitalist system, and its effect, excellent indeed, would be to force England to adopt the new methods under the penalty of financial ruin. ' ' The political-economy arguments of the manufacturers," wrote Engels, " that the ten-hour law would raise the cost of

i66 Studies in Socialism

production, that English manufactures would not be able to compete successfully with foreign pro- ducts, and that wages would necessarily fall, are partly true; but they prove only one thing, and that is that the industrial greatness of England can be maintained only by the barbarous treat- ment inflicted on the labourers, by the destruction of health, and the social, physical, and intellectual degradation of whole generations. Naturally, if the ten-hour bill were to become a legal measure, England would be immediately ruined; but be- cause this law would necessarily involve others that would force her into a course of action dia- metrically opposed to that which she has pursued hitherto, the law would be a step in advance,"

What a spirit of mistrust he shows toward all partial reforms, what narrow limits he assigns to the forces of self-transformation innate in the industrial system ! And when, fifty years after- wards, in 1892, Engels republished this book, he never dreamed for a moment of asking himself by what corruption of thought, by what systematic error, he had been led to such false ideas on the political and social movement in England. He preferred to view with complacency a work to which history had given the lie in almost every particular. It is then perfectly natural to suppose that Engels, with this fundamental conception of things, should have always inclined, as Marx did, to give precedence to the forces that in the capi- talist system tend to lower the status of the

The Question of Method 167

workmen, over those forces tliat tend to raise it.

But it is not very important what interpretation we give to the obscure and uncertain thought of Marx and Engels on this subject. The essential thing is that no Socialist nowadays accepts the theory of the absolute pauperisation of the prole- tariat. All Socialists, indeed, some openly, others with infinite precautions, some with a mischievous Viennese good-nature, declare it to be untrue that, taken as a whole, the economic material condition of the proletariat is getting worse and worse. It must be conceded, after taking account of the tendency to sink and the tendency to rise, that in the immediate reality of life, the tendency to sink is not the stronger. Once this has been granted it is no longer possible to repeat after Marx and Engels that the capitalist system will perish be- cause it does not ensure to those whom it exploits the minimum necessities of life. It follows from the same admission that it has also become puerile to expect that an economic cataclysm, menacing the proletariat in its very existence, will bring about, by the revolt of the instinct of self-pre- servation, the " violent overthrow of the bour- geoisie."

Thus, the two hypotheses, one historic and the other economic, from which, according to the ideas of the Communist Maiiifesto, the sudden pro- letarian revolution would inevitably result, are proved to be equally untenable. In the political world there will be no bourgeois revolution on

1 68 Studies in Socialism

which the revolutionary proletariat can mount and ride to victory, and in the economic world no cataclysm which will set up in a single day the class domination of the Communist proletariat, and a new system of production on the ruins of overthrown capitalism. These hypotheses have not, however, been altogether vain. If the prole- tariat has been unable to seize the control of a single one of the bourgeois revolutions, it has nevertheless in a hundred and twenty years forced its way into all the agitations of the revolutionary bourgeoisie; and it will continue to profit by the inevitable internal conflicts of the bourgeoisie. If there has not been a complete and revolutionary reaction of the instinct of self-preservation under the pressure of a complete capitalist catastrophe, there have nevertheless been innumerable crises, that, showing as they do the essential disorder of capitalist production, have naturally incited the proletarians to prepare a new order. But they commit a serious error who expect the letter of the prophecy to be fulfilled, who look for the sud- den downfall of capitalism, and the sudden ac- cession of the proletariat to power as the result either of a great political collapse of bourgeois society, or a great economic collapse of bourgeois production.

It is not by an unexpected counter-stroke of political agitation that the proletariat will gain supreme power, but by the methodical and legal organisation of its own forces under the law of

The Question of Method 169

the democracy and universal suffrage. It is not by the collapse of the capitalistic bourgeoisie, but by the growth of the proletariat, that the Com- munist order will gradually install itself in our society. Whoever accepts these truths, which have now become necessary, will soon understand the precise and certain methods of social trans- formation and progressive organisation which they entail. Those who do not completely ac- cept them and those who do not take the decisive result of the proletarian movements of a century very seriously; those who revert to the Commimist Manifesto so obviously superannuated by the course of events, or who mix remnants of old thought that no longer contain any truth with the direct and true thoughts suggested by present reality, all such Socialists condemn themselves to a life of chaos.

But I could justify these general affirmations in detail only by the minute analysis of the present tendencies of French Socialism and International Socialism. I could make out the case for the method I have sketched here only by specific ap- plications and by the exposition of a programme of " revolutionary evolution." This I shall at- tempt in a more systematic work and one more carefully planned than these fragmentary studies, which I now offer by request to those fair-minded readers who are anxious to obtain in these diffi- cult questions even a modest beginning of light.

XIV

SPEECH AT THE ANGEO-FRENCH PAR- EIAMENTARY DINNER'

For me too it is a great pleasure to welcome our guests this evening, and I hail with delight this latest sign, which has been preceded by- many others, of the coming together of two great nations.

One hundred and twenty years ago, in the revolutionary crisis that hurried forward the movement of the modern world, they met in a long and violent conflict. But this formidable encounter did not compromise the future. Eng- land might have feared the growing and ex- panding Revolution. She feared that her free commerce and her legitimate influence would be imperilled by a coalition of all the European na- tions, united by the revolutionary Idea and the revolutionary Sword. And she feared that a vio- lent propaganda would disturb the balance of her own constitution and would substitute the réghne of crises for the strong and continuous evolution that marked her own greatness.

' Delivered on November 26, 1903. 170

Anglo-French Dinner Speech 171

Hence arose a misunderstanding big with storm and peril. Experience, however, has shown that the very Revolution that quickened the free en- ergies of all peoples, increased also the scope and the resources of the eldest of the free peoples. Experience has shown that the ardent force of the French Revolution animated without disturbing the evolution of the English nation: this nation has been able to pass without a shock from the oligarchical suffrage of Pitt to the almost univer- sal suffrage of Gladstone; it has been able to enlarge the foundations of its public life without disturbing them.

And history itself has done away with the mis- understanding, for though difiSculties may arise in the expansion of both nations across the face of the world, the day for irreparable conflicts has long since passed away. Against accidents and surprises we have now set a friendship that is growing daily in trust and good understanding. It is in the organisation of this friendship, if I may use the expression, that we are now engaged.

This friendship is not exclusive, nor is it offen- sive; there is nothing secret about it. It not only does not threaten any one, but it can annoy no one. The trust that exists between us in- volves no distrust towards others.

Human life, and international life especially, has been saturated with hate, jealousy, and deceit for so long, that even to-day, in the midst of pro- found European peace, there are some minds who

172 Studies in Socialism

cannot see two nations drawing closer together without speculating against whom or against what they are uniting. These people could not, I suppose, attend a wedding without asking against whom the marriage was directed. No, if the great free peoples, living under the parlia- mentary regime, England, Italy, and France, join hands and become friends, it is not with the idea of using the advantages of freedom to secure

selfish ends. They do it to help on the great European and human alliance, by enlarging and extending national friendships. They do it to serve the cause of civilisation, of justice, and of peace, in Europe, in the Near East, and at last in the entire world !

And the workers of France and England long passionately for this great European peace, the peace of all humanity, stable, well organised, and permanent. In these quiet and smiling days I cannot forget that a few years ago, at the very height of the crisis that threatened the good rela- tions of the two countries, delegates from the English trades-unions came to Paris and entered into a compact of brotherly friendship with the French unions at the Bourse de Travail. And they said then a wise and true thing : that we ought to build up a reserve of confidence and solidarity between the two nations in peaceful years, upon which we could draw during the trials and excitements of difiScult times.

This is what we are doing to-day, gentlemen.

Anglo-French Dinner Speech 1 73

We are devoting to the cause of peace that faculty of foresight which, until to-day, man has reserved exclusively for the service of war.

I lately found in our National Library a little anonymous work, published by Johnson, near St. Paul's Church, in 1792, in which the author cries: " The time has come when the silent ma- jesty of misery must be heard," The majesty of suffering labour is no longer dumb : it speaks now with a million tongues, and it asks the na- tions not to increase the ills which crush down the workers by an added burden of mistrust and hate, by wars and the expectation of wars.

Gentlemen, you may ask how and when and in what form this longing for international con- cord will express itself to some purpose. I will not hazard a guess this evening. Experience has taught me that one must be prudent when one speaks on these questions before one Parlia- ment, and reason suggests that this prudence should be doubled when speaking before two.

Moreover, if we lack modesty and patience, we need only remember that in 1790 an Englishman who (before M. Mill) represented the town of Calais — the famous Co7iventionncl, Thomas Paine — wrote in a book, which had a great success in France, that England, France, and the United States ought to agree to cut down their naval ex- penses by half, and devote the money thus econo- mised to old-age pensions for workmen; but the memory of this plea is already distant, so distant

174 Studies in Socialism

that there is more pathos than danger in evoking it.

And if you press me to risk a prophecy on my own account, I can only answer you by a parable which seems a little strange still and obscure. I gleaned it by fragments from the legends of Mer- lin the magician, from the Arabian Nights, and from a book that is still unread.

Once upon a time there was an enchanted forest. It had been stripped of all verdure, it was wild and forbidding. The trees, tossec^ by the bitter winter wind that never ceased, struck one another with a sound as of breaking swords. When at last, after a long series of freezing nights and sunless days that seemed like nights, all liv- ing things trembled with the first call of spring, the trees became afraid of the sap that began to move within them. And the solitary and bitter spirit that had its dwelling within the hard bark of each of them said very low, with a shudder that came up from the deepest roots : ' ' Have a care! If thou art the first to risk yielding to the wooing of the new season, if thou art the first to turn thy lance-like buds into blossoms and leaves, their delicate raiment will be torn by the rough blows of the trees that have been slower to put forth leaves and flowers."

And the proud and melancholy spirit that was shut up within the great Druidical oak spoke to its tree with peculiar insistence: " And wilt thou, too, seek to join the universal love-feast, thou

Anglo-French Dinner Speech 175

whose noble branches have been broken by the storm ? ' '

Thus, in the enchanted forest, mutual distrust drove back the sap, and prolonged the death-like winter even after the call of spring.

What happened at last ? By what mysterious influence was the grim charm broken ? Did some tree find the courage to act alone, like those April poplars that break into a shower of verdure and give from afar the signal for a renewal of all life ? Or did a warmer and more life-giving beam start the sap moving in all the trees at once ? For lo! in a single day the whole forest burst forth into a magnificent flowering of joy and peace, {ap- plause.)

Gentlemen, if you will allow me to fit my toast to this old allegory, and to give it before you and with you the form of an invocation to Natiu"e, I will drink to the sunbeam that charmed the whole forest into bloom.

These admirable words were greeted by a burst of enthusiasm. Friends and opponents alike came up to congratulate the Socialist leader.

(Extract from the report of the visit of the group of Knglish members of Parliament to Paris. )

XV

TRUTH OR FICTION?'

I WAS present the other day, quite by chance, at the successful trial trip of M. Santos Dumont's airship at lyongchamp. It is for man a great emotion and a great joy to witness a new victory of man over inanimate things. I do not know what the practical value of these experiments may be. They are undoubtedly only the feeble begin- ning of an uncertain invention, because it seems that the aeronaut cannot risk his balloon against the full strength of the wind and probably his motors could not stand a long trip.

But he does steer: he makes the balloon turn in every direction and then go like an arrow to the point he has fixed upon. For the first time the line of a human will has been marked in space, the plan of a human thought developed. Until now balloons could only be steered in a ver- tical direction, and that very clumsily. They dropped lower when part of their gas was allowed to escape, they rose higher when part of their ballast was thrown overboard, but beyond that

' Petite République^ October 26, 1901. 176

Truth or Fiction? ^n

they were a prey to the forces of nature, the play- thing of winds and violent or treacherous currents.

Man, suddenly helpless and paralysed, was swallowed up by space. He was nothing more than a thing subject to the blind sway of the ele- ments, and his mind was a passive spectator of the struggle of different forces ; it could not con- trol, it could not interfere. Man is really present only when thought is active and will is at least partly effective. So until now it was only a sort of effigy of man and not man himself who braved the heights. Now at last man with his imperious will and his definite and vigorous thought is as- serting himself in the upper spaces.

It was not without emotion that I saw the bal- loon, after having turned on itself several times to test its power, start off swiftly and go in a straight line exactly to the spot toward which the mind of man was steering it by the rudder. Here was no longer the light caprice of natural forces, no longer the terrifying lawlessness of the cur- rents and winds. In their place had been sub- stituted the rectitude of human thought, the systematic inflexibility of the human will, master at last of what had been for us hitherto the region of the formless, the unregulated, and the chaotic. It was a splendid sight and stirred all one's mental pride.

As I watched that swift and well regulated flight I thought of Homer's marvellous intuition and of his magnificent simile in which he seems to have

178 Studies in Socialism

a presentiment of the future harmony of sub- missive nature and sovereign mind: "Their ships went afar oflf, swift and true as the flight of thought." Now it was the air-ship that went, not yet afar off", but swift and true like thought. Marvellous intuition of the Greek poet, making the harmony of thought the ideal measure of all motion.

That is the aim of man, that is the object of life eternally carried on by the species : to subdue all nature to the harmonious law of mind. And hu- man society will come under the same sway, for it too is still but a part of nature, it is blind and unconscious as she is and composed of brutal and obscure forces at war with each other and con- trolled by no one.

And those phenomena that we call crises, what are they if not a revelation of the chaotic and rebellious nature that still forms the basis of hu- man society? We can never have a " human" society or humanity, in the true sense of the word, until men have learned to govern social phe- nomena as they are learning to govern natural phenomena. In that frail balloon moving delib- erately toward its goal I see a part of the immense human problem. I might express it in this way : to make life, social life as well as natural life, a thing that can be steered, and to confide the man- agement of it to humanity itself, a humanity that shall be free, self-conscious, and united. Thus

Truth or Fiction? 179

the thoughts familiar to Socialists took on fresh shape and meaning to me.

But ironic reality, that sometimes takes delight in a juxtaposition of events as fanciful as romance, recalled me quickly to the world of vain quarrels, sharp disputes, and misunderstandings. While I was rejoicing in a free impersonal pride the pride of the human race and of Socialism, and was looking with emotion on the spectacle presented by victorious man, master of nature and of him- self, a knot of curious observers had been formed. They were watching the bold attempt and were nearly all enthusiastic and sympathetic. But I recognised one of my friends, a man whose con- clusions often distress me, on the outskirts of the group. He is a rather excitable but perfectly sincere journalist who, when he is telling a story, only gets confused in the matter of names and dates, or so his editor says.

He alone remained sombre and doubting as though he were carrying the burden of a bitter secret.

"How strange!" he murmured; "here is a justification of all our suspicions. He could turn from right to left and he turns from left to right, the direction of every treachery. ' '

The people who stood about were astonished.

"Will you never be able to see and under- stand?" he went on in a sharper tone. " After giving you all the ideas you have, must I explain

' The reactionary parties sit ou the right iu the French Parliament.

i8o Studies in Socialism

this to you too? Don't you see that this man has agreed to go round the Eiffel Tower that was built with the stolen Panama money ? Don't you see that in bringing the Eiffel Tower into an ex- periment that is, anyway, of very doubtful value but that has excited all the faddists of progress and of science, they wished to rehabilitate the Panama Company and Eiffel, and Waldeck-Rous- seau, who was their champion ? I say to you, I who have not been bought by either cheats or fools, what you see up there is a trick of the Min- istry and the Panama Company. That man has stolen right and left: he has stolen from the pub- lic secret funds and I, I alone wall denounce him."

And, as the balloon disappeared behind the glowing tops of the autumn trees, he cried in a voice that was rather sharp and shrill:

'^ Pa7iamiste / Panamiste ! ^^

I was pondering over this amazing sequence of ideas and awaiting with some anxiety the reap- pearance of the poor abused balloon when a " revolutionist " hailed me. He is an authentic, implacable, impeccable revolutionist, one of those whose loyal service to the Revolution can never be brought into question, since they spend pre- cisely the whole of their lives in accusing others of not serving it. Just then the balloon reap- peared, struggling against the wind this time, tossed by invisible billows, pitching and plung- ing, but in spite of all keeping firmly on its way on that uncertain and troublous upper sea. The

Truth or Fiction ? i8j

revolutionist pointed to the poor little balloon that with puny but heroic steadfastness was moving toward its goal. His gesture was haughty and contemptuous.

* ' There, ' ' he said roughly, ' ' you see where all the compromises of Empiricism and Reformism lead to ! Is that what science prophesied ? Is that what we in the name of science promised to the people and to humanity? Men have been promised complete control over the air; they have been told that they are to mount to the level of the mount- ain-tops without effort and that they are to have dominion over infinite horizons. And now what is offered to them ? A little promenade of a few miles two hundred metres above the earth, in easy, mediocre, bourgeois weather. I call it a shame, a miserable trick,

" We were expecting a Leviathan of the air, that was to carry the whole human race, freed from the bonds of gravity, fastened to his great belly. And they offer us this little flying-fish, this minnow from the Seine that has jumped out of the water. Mystification and abdication ! The way to take the strength and courage out of peo- ple is by producing these grotesque parodies, these sham discoveries that can only be compared to sham reforms. We refuse to countenance such disillusionising attempts. We refuse to coun- tenance such imitations of the great scientific programme.

" And then what is the use of inventing bal-

1 82 Studies in Socialism

loons under our present social conditions ? You know perfectly well that no one will profit by them but the members of the privileged class. They -will be class balloons. Citizen Lafargue was right when he said that the scientists, Volta, Galvani, Ampère, Oersted, and the others, had only invented electricity so that the capitalists could force women to work at night. Here we have an ingenious application of economic ma- terialism and a useful warning. Who knows what plot international capitalism will mature in the lofty solitude of the night when a fleet of air- ships are able to give each other a meeting-place there ?

" No, indeed, we are not going to be deceived; we are not going to compromise ourselves. Since they desire schism, let them have it. We will found the group of Revolutionary Aeronauts, in other words, of aeronauts who will wait until the Revolution is accomplished before they invent balloons. Science would prostitute itself if it al- lowed a ray of glory to light up the last days of bourgeois societ5\ We will leave to others the shame of this prostitution."

In spite of this tirade, the poor little scorned and excommunicated balloon was enduring the final onslaught of a wind- wave more violent than the others, before arriving at the end that the humble and glorious will of man had set for it. By a supreme effort it overcame, and as it began to descend with a precise, slow, and measured

Truth or Fiction? 183

movement the ' ' revolutionary ' ' raised his curs- ing voice and cried :

' ' Come down, come down ! you are desecrating our ideal."

XVI

MOONLIGHT

I WAS walking the other evening in the coun- try, and talking with a young friend who had just graduated among the first of his class at the École Polytechnique after having done very good work in literature, and who is as broad-minded as he is keen.

Our way led over a broad upland, shut in on the left by low rounded hills which were separated by ravine-like meadows. The full moon lit up the fresh clear space, and the pale distant stars shone with a tender sweetness. The road, white under the radiance, stretched out straight before us and was lost far away in the mystery of the horizon, bathed in light and shadow. It seemed to lead from reality to dreamland.

" Yes," I said to him, " the thing that angers me in our present society is not only the physical suffering that might be mitigated by another regime, but the moral suffering that is brought by a state of warfare and monstrous inequality.

" To labour should be a natural function and a joy; often it is nothing more than servitude and

' La Dépêche, October 15, 1890. 184

Moonlight 185

suffering. It ouglit to be the war waged by all mankind united against inanimate things, against the fatalities of nature and the difiSculties of life; it is the war of man with man. Men spend their days struggling to take from one another the joys of life by fraud, by the arts of bitter greed, the oppression of the weak, and all the violent meth- ods of unlimited competition. Kven among those who are called happy there are few who are really happy, because the brutal conditions of life hold them in their grip; they hardly have the right to be just and kind under pain of ruin. In the uni- versal warfare, some are the slaves of their fortune as others are the slaves of their poverty. Yes,, above and below, our present social order produces nothing but slaves, because those men are not free who have neither the time nor the strength to follow the noblest instincts of their minds and their souls.

" And if you look at the lower grades, what poverty you see, I don't say in the means of life, but in life itself! Look at the millions of la- bourers; they work in the factories and in the workshops, yet they have no right whatever in those factories and workshops; they can be turned out to-morrow. Neither have they any right over the machine they tend, no share of ownership in the immense tool that humanity has bit by bit created for itself; they are strangers in the or- ganised power of the world; they are almost strangers in the civilisation of the world.

1 86 Studies in Socialism

"In the mines, the canals, the railroads, the ports, the prodigious applications of steam and electricity and all the great enterprises that de- velop the power and the pride of man, they have no part, no part at all, except that of inert in- struments. They have no seat in the councils that decide on new undertakings and direct them; these are entirely in the hands of a limited class which knows all the joys of intellectual activity and hardy initiative, just as it possesses all the pleasures of wealth, and which would be happy if it were permitted to man to be happy apart from human solidarity. There are millions of labourers who are reduced to an inert and me- chanical existence. And, terrifying as the idea is, if to-morrow machines could be substituted for them, nothing would be changed in human existence.

"When, on the contrary. Socialism has tri- umphed, when conditions of peace have succeeded to conditions of combat, when all men have their share of property in the immense human capital, and their share of initiative and of the exercise of free-will in the immense human activity, then all men will know the fulness of pride and joy; and they will feel that they are co-operators in the universal civilisation, even if their immediate contribution is only the humblest manual labour; and this labour, more noble and more fraternal in character, will be so regulated that the labourers shall always reserve for themselves some leisure

Moonlight 187

hours for reflection and for a cultivation ot the sense of hfe.

" They will have a better understanding of the hidden meaning of life, whose mysterious aim is the harmony of all consciences, of all forces, and of all liberties. They will understand history better and will love it, because it will be their his- tory, since they are the heirs of the whole human race. Finally, the}' will understand the universe better; because when they see conscience and spirit triumphing in humanity, they will be quick to feel that this universe which has given birth to humanity cannot be fundamentally brutal and blind, that there is spirit everywhere, soul every- where, and that the universe itself is simply an immense confused aspiration toward order, beauty, freedom, and goodness. Their point of view will be changed; they will look with new eyes not only at their brother men, but at the earth and the sky, rocks and trees, animals, flowers, and stars.

"And that is why we have the right to think of these things in the open fields and under the star- light sky. Yes, we can call the sublime night to witness our sublime hopes, the night in which new worlds are being formed in secret, and we can mingle the immense gentleness and sweet- ness of peaceful nature with our vision of human gentleness and sweetness."

" Well and good," answered my young en- gineer, "but why don't you simply talk about

i88 Studies in Socialism

social progress; why do you bring in Socialism? Social progress is a real thing, whereas Socialism is nothing but a word. It is the name of a small, but very vehement or rather violent sect, which is, moreover, divided against itself: it is not a serious force making for progress. Possibly the solutions which the Socialists propose will be gradually adopted, but their triumph will not be due to the Socialists. There will never be a gov- ernment acting and legislating in the name of Socialism, because a government has to base its action on existing facts, even when it is reforming the present order or creating a new order. Well, Socialism poses as an overwhelming revelation, a new gospel, that looks to the future itself for the basis on which to build the future.

" As a matter of fact, all the elements of the problem exist already in our present society and the solution is indicated or even roughly sketched in: the solution of the social problem is wholly comprised in political liberty, the development of popular education, and the right of labour to or- ganise. Well, political liberty exists, education, and an education always more advanced, is be- coming more and more diffused in the labour world, and the workers have the right to or- ganise.

" When they are better educated they will be- gin by taking part through their imagination and their intelligence in all great human undertak- ings, and when their personal subjective value

Moonlight 189

has been increased in this way, it will react of its own accord on the social régime by an irresistible action from within outward. For instance, if all the children of the lower classes acquire the taste and the need for reading, if their education has been vital and effective enough to bring about this result, it is impossible that this universal need will not in the end insure to the workers some hours of leisure for the pleasures of the mind, by a more economical regulation of the work. Moreover, when they understand the mechanism of production and exchange better, when they know exactly what conditions obtain in manufacture generally and in their industry in particular, what its markets are, what capital is invested in it and how much more capital could be profitably employed in its development, then these men, free, organised, and well educated as they will be, will by the very nature of things be- gin to be admitted as members of the boards of directors of the great corporations, and afterwards, little by little, to the management of ordinary business concerns. The next step will be profit- sharing, and a share of authority and of economic power.

" But I repeat, all this will be accomplished without the aid of any high-sounding formulas, and we shall find that we have arrived at the end of Socialism without ever having come across Socialism on the way. Old sailors make the new hands believe that when they go from one pole to

190 Studies in Socialism

the other they have to pass over the line of the equator, stretched taut and firm on the surface of the sea. No, the hue is never seen, and unless most minute calculations are made we cross it without having any idea that we have done so: in the same way we shall cross the Socialist equator.

" The revolutionaries of 1848, for whom you appear to cherish an affection, were generous but extremely annoying. They never spoke of the Future without a capital letter, and they con- trasted the Past and the Present as though they were respectively an archangel of light and a demon from the pit. They were constantly feel- ing the breath of the future pass in their long hair, and thrill through their long beards. They looked for the man of the future, the society of the future, the science of the future, the art of the future, the religion of the future. I even believe they thought the modest sun that gives us light a very mediocre, very bourgeois, sort of star, and that they were looking for the sun of the future.

" It always seemed to them that souls inflamed and burning with zeal were going to raise up a new social order, as the internal fire in our earth can raise up new mountain peaks; and there was not a little pride mingled with this hope, because they had made up their minds beforehand that they were to be the managers or directors of the new society, and the new mountain-tops were to be their pedestal. What illusions of generosity! what chimeras of vanity ! The main form of

Moonlight 191

human society, like that of earth itself, is fairly definitely established; there will be transforma- tions, but not any vast metamorphosis. There will not be a social upheaval any more than there will be a geological upheaval.

" Human progress has entered upon its silent period, which is not the least productive. Pascal used to say, when he looked at the sky spread out above our heads: ' The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.' For me, on the contrary, after these times of election excitement, of newspaper polemics and all our wordy agitation, it has a message of consolation and encourage- ment. The universe knows how to accomplish its work without any noise; no declamations echo in those heights, no flaming programme obtrudes itself among the tranquil constellations. I believe that French society has at last entered upon that happy stage where everything is accomplished quietly and without any jars, because everything is accomplished in its full maturity. There will be reforms, great reforms even, but they will come to pass without having been given a name, and they will not trouble the calm life of the nation any more than the dropping of ripe fruit troubles the still autumn days. Humanity will raise itself insensibly toward fraternal justice, just as the earth that bears us rises with a silent motion in the starry spaces."

" My dear fellow, I can hardly wait to answer you, I have so many things to say."

192 Studies in Socialism

*' No, no; don't answer me to-night, only look and listen. While we are dreaming of the future and arguing, everything that lives, everything that exists is giving itself up to the joy of the passing moment, to the instant sweetness of the serene night. The peasants are going in groups to the meeting-place of the farm to gather in the corn, and as they go they are singing in a full chorus; the awakened snake trembles a little and then sleeps again in the mystery of the thicket. In the stubble, in the dried-up fields, some poor little creatures are still singing; their music is not insistent and universal as it is in the warm spring nights or the hot summer nights; but they will sing till the end, as long as they are not really frozen by the winter. Fires of dry grass glow in the middle of the fields, and the moon- light envelops and softens their gleam; it is as though the spirit of the earth flamed and was mingled with the mysterious light of the skies. Stray dogs are barking at a belated waggon that comes slowly along the road, lit by a little lantern and drawn by a little donkey. A lovelorn owl hoots plaintively in the chestnut grove; the ripe chestnuts fall with a thud and roll down the little valleys. A small green frog is croaking near the fountain; the heavens shine and the earth sings. Come, let the universe be; it contains joy for all. It is Socialistic after its own fashion."

INDEX

Absolutism, Prussian, 48.

Action Socialiste, L' , xliii.

Administrative organisation, Socialist, xxx.

Allegory, an, 176-183.

Ampère, André Marie, 182.

Asceticism and Socialism, 16.

Audler, Charles, xxii, note.

Autocracy, Russian, 45-48.

Babeuf, François Noël, 15, 137, 148.

Bebel, Ferdinand August, quoted, 162, note.

Bernstein, 162, note.

Bismarck, Prince Otto von, 47, 68.

Bordeaux Congress, Report of, xxxix, note.

Bourgeois, Léon, 23.

Capital (Karl Marx's), 162, note.

Capital, private ownership of, 7-13.

Carrel, Armand, 137.

Case for the Factory Acts, The, quoted, xvi, note.

Class, industrial, growth of, 56-58.

Code Napoléon, 33.

Collectivism, 96.

Collectivisme, Le, Vandervelde's, xxvi, note.

Communism, definition of, 23-24; 49, 92, 113, 114, 115.

Communist Manifesto, The, quoted, xxiv; 13, 137;

quoted, 138; 142, 143-144, 146, 147, 148, 152;

quoted, 153, 156-157; 162, note. Communist Society, German, 43. Compromise, question of, xxxvi. Congress, International, at Amsterdam, xli. Declaration of the Rights of Man, 10-12. Democracy, German Social, 82-83. 193

194 Index

Die Neue Zeit, 132, note.

Dreyfus, Affaire, 67.

Dumont, Santos, 176.

Eiffel Tower, 180.

Empiricism, 181.

Engels, quoted, xxiv, 138-139, 153-154, 156-157; 164;

quoted, 165-166. Ensor, R. C. K., his Modern Socialism quoted, xxxv-

xxxvi, note. Essays on Socialism, Fabian, xxxi, note Fourier, François Marie Charles, 16, 17, 19. Franco-German Annals, 159. Galvani, Luigi, 182. Gambetta, Republic of, 148, note. Gladstone, W. E., 171. Government or Human Evoluticm, 3 1 , note Guede, xxxvii. Homer, 177. Humanité, L', xli.

Hunter, Robert, quoted, xiv-xv, note. Individual, the power of, in modern society, 51-52. Industrial Democracy, quoted, xvi, note. Inequalities remediable through Socialism, 184-187. Injustice, social, responsibility for, xvii-xxi. Jaurès, Jean, his career and personality, xU-xliii ; speech

at Anglo-French Parliamentary dinner, 170-175;

his prophecy, 174-175. Justice, social, x— xiv. *""' Kaustky, 132, and 132, note. Kelly, Edmond, his Government or Human Evolution,

xxvi, note; xxxi, note. Labour, minimum of, under Socialist régime, xxv-xxvi. Lassalle, Ferdinand, quoted, 132, 162. Liberty, individual, 8-9. Liebknecht, sayings of, 60-69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75-76,

77, 81-86, 87-93.

Index 195

Marat, Jean Paul, quoted, 15.

Marx, Karl, quoted, xxiv, 44; 133, 136; quoted, 138,

139, 143-145, 146, 153-154, 156-157, 159-160,

162, note. Maury, Abbé, 98. Menger, Prof., quoted, xxii, xxiii; his L'Etat Socialiste,

xxxi. Middle class, economic growth of, 56-58. Miguel, Maria Evaristo, quoted, 141. Mill, M., 173. Millerand, 66, note. Miller and. Affaire, xxxviii-xl.

Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de, 56. Modern Socialism, 162-163, note. Motive to work under Socialist régime, xxv-xxx. Oersted, Hans Christian, 182. "Opportunism," Socialist, 70, 79-86. Owners of property, despotic position of, xvi. Paine, Thomas, 173. Parliament, the Frankfort, 49.

Parties, political, from Socialist standpoint, xxxvii Pauperisation of the proletariat, theory of, 167. Pelletan, M. Camille, 23. Petite Républiq::c, La, xliii. Pitt, Williari, 171.

Presuppositions of Socialism, 162, note. Privileged classes and Socialism, 88-93. Production, monopoly of the means of, 8-9. Propaganda, Socialist, 86. Property, private, 23-33. Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 17, 18, 19. Quasi-C ollectivism, xxi, note. Radical party and French Socialism, 22. Red Terror, the, 95. Reformism, 181. Reforms demanded by Socialism, xxiv-xxv.

196 Index

Revolution, Socialist, 102-105, 11 2-1 23; dangers of, 124-129; Marx's and Blanqui's ideas on, 136; and the bourgeois revolution, 140-168.

Russia, 45-48.

Saint-Just, Louis Antoine de, 143.

Saint-Simon, Claude Henri, 16, 17, 19.

See, Henri, quoted, 28-29.

Serfdom, 25-28.

Situation of the Working Classes in England, 164; quoted, 165-166.

Slavery, 23-28.

Socialism, aim of, 3-9, 91; duties of, 144-145; establish- ment of, by will of majority, 94-105; and the French Revolution, 15-17; future of, 20; germs of, in peasantry, 35-40; main definition of, v;

methods of establishing: militant method or

revolutionary, xxxii-xxxiii ; method unsettled, 35; Opportunist, Reformist, Revisionist, or Fabian, xxxiii-xxxvi ; — militant, 20; practibility of, 20; revolutionary, 47-50, 50 sqq., 58-59; triumphant 186-187.

Société Nouvelle, report of, xxxix, note.

Society, present state of, 184-186.

Strike, general, 106-129.

Survival of the fittest, theory of, discussed, xix-xxi.

Tactics, Socialist, 70-78.

Unemployed, the, xiv, and xiv, note.

Universal suffrage and Socialism, 168-169.

Utopia and Socialism, 20-21.

Vaillant, xxxvii.

Vandervelde, his Le Collectivisme, xxvi, note.

Van Vollmar, xxxix, note.

Vorwdrts, 79, 104.

Wage-earner, position of, xx-xxi.

Waldeck- Rousseau, 180.

Index 197

War, Crimean, 45, 48; Hundred Years', 120; Thirty- Years', 120.

Wealth, justice of the division of, xii-xiii; the root of social distinctions, and of despotic power over labour, xiv; a social product, xxi-xxiii; Socialistic division of, xxiii-xxvii.

Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, quoted, xvi, note; their Industrial Democracy, xxxi, note.

Working classes in England, Engel's remarks on, 165- 166.

Ji Selection from the Catalogue of

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

Complete Catalogues sent on application

Economics.

Hadley's Economics.

An Account of the Relations between Private Property and Public Welfare. By Arthur Twining Had- LEY, Professor of Political Economy, in Yale Uni- versity. 8°, $2.50 net

The work isnow used in classes m Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Amherst, Dart- mouth, Bowdoin, Vanderbilt, Bucknell, Bates, Leland Stanford, University of Oregon, University of California, etc.

" The author has done his work splendidly. He £s clear, precise, and thorough. . . . No other book has given an equally compact and intelligent interpretation." — American Journal of Sociology.

The Bargain Tlieory of Wages.

By John Davidson, M.A., D Phil. (Edin.), Professor of Political Economy in the University of New Bruns- wick. i2mo, $1.50.

_ A Critical Development from the Historic Theories, together with an examin- ation of Certain Wages Factors : the Mobility of Labor, Trades Unionism, and the Methods of Industrial Remuneration.

" This able volume is the most satisfactory work on Distribution that has yet appeared. Prof. Davidson's theory appeals to our common sense as in harmony with actual conditions, and he has worked it out with convincing logic in accord- ance with the principles of economic science. We recommend it all students of economics as the most important contribution to the science of Political Economy that has recently appeared." — Interior.

Sociology.

A Treatise. By John Bascom, author of "esthetics,** " Comparative Psychology," etc. 12°, $1.50.

" Gives a wholesome and inspiring word on all the living social questions of the day ; and its suggestions as to how the social life_ of man may be made purer and truer are rich with the finer wisdom of the time. _ The author is always liberal in spirit, generous in his sympathies, and wise in his knowledge," — Critic,

A General Freiglit and Passenger Post.

A Practical Solution of the Railroad Problem. By James L. Cow les. Third revised edition, with ad- ditional material. 12°, cloth, $1.25 ; paper, 5octs.

" The book gives the best account which has thus far been given in English of the movement for a reform in our freight and passenger-t?.riff policy, and the best arguments in favor of such reform,'*— Edmund J. James, in the Annah of Political and Social Science.

" The book treats in a very interesting and somewhat novel way of an ex- tremely difficult subject and is well worth careful reading by all students of the transportation question." — From letter of Edw. A. MosELBV, Secretary ol the Interstate Commerce Commission, Washington, D.C.

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York and London

Fields, Factories, and Workshops

or

Industry Combined with Agriculture, and Brain Work with Manual Work

By PRINCE KROPOTKIN

New Edition, i6° . . . 90 cents net

" Prince Kropotkin possesses the general scientific temper. . . . He seems to have been everywhere and to have read everything so that his observations have certainly been widely extended. . . . A book that should set people thinking and should lead them to try by practical experience to lessen soma of the acknowledged evils of the present system." — The Times, London.

" Our readers are recommended to read carefully Kropotkin's survey of manufacturing progress in foreign countries. . . . This is clear and concise and presents just the kind of summary re- quired by those who, without time for intricate details, must rest content with a general statement of the world's industrial move- ment. Particularly interesting is the description of the wonder- ful advance now being made in agricultural methods. . . . The book is a most valuable contribution to the discussion of a prob- lem of national and of world-wide importance." — The Daily News, London.

"A book which is an admirable example of its author's lucid- ity of style and of his capacity for making vital with human interest dry statistical and industrial facts. ... A work that presents a new outlook in social economics and is at the same time most forcible in its demonstration of fact." — London West, minster Gazette.

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

New York. London

By CHARLES A. CONANT

A History of Modern Banks of Issue

With an Account of the Economic Crises of the Present Century. Fifth Impression, 8°. $3.00.

*' No better volume can be recommended to the general reader who wishes to familiarize himself not only with the theory of bank- ing, but with the history and actual experience of this great agency of industrial progress." — Chicago Evening Post.

" We can only express our hearty appreciation of the book as a whole. It is extremely interesting. It cannot but be useful, and to us it is very cheering. Mr. Conant's book, from beginning to end, is a proof that sound currency is evolved necessarily from the pro- gress of an industrial and commercial people," — N. Y. Times.

Wall Street and the Country

A Study of Recent Financial Tendencies. 8°. Net, $1.25. (By mail, $1.35.)

" The author shows a comprehensive grasp of economic and financial problems, and the capacity for a clearness of statement. . . . His book should be in the hands of all who are interested in the important subjects discussed." — Wall Sti'eet yournal.

" Charles A. Conant is an able apologist for the functions and the methods of Wall Street. The book is most intelligent and full of pertinent information." — Indianapolis News.

Q. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

New York London

I

By James Albert Woodburn

(Professor of American History and Politics, Indiana University)

The American Republic and Its Government.

An Analysis of the Government of the United States, with a Consideration of its Funda- mental Principles and of its Relations to the States and Territories. Octavo (by mail, $2 20) ..... nei, $2 00

" A sounder or more useful commentary has never before seen the light. Even Mr. James Bryce's study of the 'Ameri- can Commonwealth ' must on the whole be deemed less fruit- ful. Not a single page should be overlooked." — M. W. Hazeltine in the JV. Y. Sun.

" Every citizen that wishes to obtain a clear and compre- hensive knowledge of the government under which he lives can hardly forego acquaintance with this work, and its orderly arrangement and lucid style will make the acquaintance a pleasure as well as a profit." — Indianapolis News.

Political Parties and Party Problems in the United States. A Sketch of American Party History and of the Development and Operations of Party Machinery, together with a Consideration of Certain Party Problems in their Relations to Political Morality. Octavo (by mail, $2 20) . . . net, $2 00

"An exceptionally clear, interesting, and impartial history of American political parties, a lucid explanation of the work- ings of party machinery, and a strong statement of the moral evils now debasing our political life, and the remedies which an awakened public conscience may apply. A thoroughly good book for the school and for the study." — Otitlook.

Send, for Descriptive Circular

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS .

NEW YORK LONDON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

	^
r^^ffii^'»®
JUN2 31975 WtrD LD-URL
^•^^^/ 8 198^3 Apr cs
''aCNOVDI 1995
Form L9-Serie8 444	-

3 1 158 00572 1278 ^

-U

HX

265

J32E

AA 001213 067 0

I

PLEA«5E DO NOT REMOVE THIS BOOK CARD !

oA^LIBRARYQ^

University Research Library

I

X

Ok 01

"C"

^,^

.> • \f I

msm]

< > > .

m

ë^'

'<';.^;

^.-'. H

^.éM.

%W tf-ft' f. '

#■:,.#. r