hands of a few large landed proprietors, as a school of Communism, which also requires large bodies of men engaged in the same pursuit to work in companies by means of subdivision in labour under a central authority. The only change required consists in the change of government. The "monarchical head" (ie. the wholesale manufacturer and large landed proprietor) is removed, and the machinery can go on just as before, only under different directors. The servants becoming masters, distinctions between employer and employed are removed altogether; the many, and not the few, will rule.

The present process of extinction of all small holders of land and capital in their competition with agricultural and mercantile magnates, and the concentration of all property in a few hands,* will speedily be accomplished, and with it the impoverishment and degradation of the people, who, exasperated at last, and disciplined for resistance by reason of intolerable grievances, will turn against the oppressors and spoliators. Then comes the deluge.

"The expropriators are expropriated." |

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*This is also alluded to by Mr. Ruskin in a characteristic passage. Speaking of the rich capitalist, he complains that by reason of superior advantages he can use his breadth and sweep of sight to gather some branch of the commerce of the country into one great cobweb, of which he is himself to be the central spider, making every thread vibrate with the points of his claws, and commanding every avenue with the facets of his eyes."-Political Economy of Art, p. 172.

There is less difficulty in this than in the former process of spoliation. In the former case it was a question of expropriation of large masses of the people by a few usurpers: now it is only a question of "expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people."

In thus deducing from existing circumstances the future abolition of private property in favour of the people, and the substitution of collective property and co-operative universal labour on scientific principles, not, as “now, for the aggrandisement of the few, but for the common good and comfort of all that toil," Marx differs from those Communists whose Utopias have been already considered. They pictured to themselves a state of things where human beings are quite different from the men and women we meet in daily life, whereas Marx takes the world as he finds it, and looks upon the evolution of Communism out of our present social condition as unavoidable, according to the laws of natural development. He regards without emotion the advancing wave of anarchical tendencies which are to bring about a transitional social catastrophe. He is satisfied to be both the prophet of evil, announcing the decree of the Nemesis of history, which sweeps away our old institutions, and the "bringer of good tidings," proclaiming the advent of a new era, when,

with the enjoyment of perfect material equality, the evils prevailing among ourselves will be banished from human society.

Marx, in his imperturbable calm, thus foreseeing coming calamities to the human race in order to its final regeneration, appears to us in the light of those “idealists who create a political terror; they are free from all desire for blood-shedding; but to them the lives of men and women are accidents; the lives of ideas are the true realities; and armed with an abstract principle and a suspicion, they perform deeds which are at once beautiful and hideous."

Happily, Karl Marx has not been tempted as yet, however, to deeds, and we are simply left, for the present, to consider his theories. This has now been done on the negative side of his theoretical system. We shall proceed to give an account of his positive proposals in the next chapter.

X

R

CHAPTER XIV.

KARL MARX AND THE INTERNATIONAL.

"IN 1848, the principles of Socialism had been partly carried into practice," says Sir Thomas Erskine May in his "History of Democracy in Europe," "and since that time they had been further extended by the International Society,* and by French and German writers." We shall show in this last chapter the influence of Karl Marx and the International Society on the latest development of the Social Democracy. We ask then, what is the latest scheme of social improvement presented for our examination in the successive official documents of contemporary Socialists? To answer this question we must slightly retrace our steps, in order to mark the successive movements of the Socialistic party founded by Lassalle, and its relative position to the party attached to Karl

* Vol. ii. p. 325.

Marx, their mutual approaches, and occasional departures from each other, ending in their final reunion at the Congress at Gotha in 1875; for this marks the close of an epoch, the final victory of the principles of the International, and the triumph of universal Communist principles over State Socialism and the more moderate demands of Lassalle,

For ten years after the death of Lassalle the party he had organised presented a lamentable spectacle of incapacity among the leaders, and mean jealousies and mutual suspicion in the rank and file of the party.

These internal divisions weakened the party and presented it in an unfavourable light before the world at large. Marx, although by reason of his intellectual superiority the natural head of the movement, was unwilling to become its acknowledged leader, and a small number of rois fainéants succeeded each other, from Becker, the immediate successor of Lassalle, styling himself the "president of humanity," downwards, until Baron von Schweitzer, a really able man, at last succeeded, in 1867, to supplant the lesser lights of the association in the presidential chair. Then," says Mehring, "the

modern Alexander (i.e. Lassalle), who had gone out to conquer a new world of bliss, had found at last the one most worthy to become his successor."