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CHAPTER X.

PRESENT-DAY PROBLEMS: LABOUR AND THE

COMMONWEALTH-SOCIALISM.

PAUPERISM and poverty, the seamy side of social life, formed the subject of the two last chapters. But the consideration of the duty of Christian citizenship with regard to them is met by a protest which is loud and emphatic. The protest is this: "All that you contemplate will not heal the hurt. The root of the evil is left untouched; the seat of the mischief is left unvisited. The ills that you trace are not on the surface of society; they belong to the interior; they are not the sign of maladjustments which can be rectified by a wise and far-reaching philanthropy; they are the consequence of a radical unsoundness, the evidence of utterly wrong and false conditions.

The whole head is

sick and the whole heart is faint' because the

social fabric is based on, and is reared up in,

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injustice. The principles and the applications of its economy are fatally and cruelly unrighteous. Nothing short of a revolution, in respect of all that forms the content of the nation's government and wealth, can set the life of the people right. Without this, all that you propose or can propose will be a mere fiddlefaddling with the misery you seek to relieve; in and by this, and in and by this alone, can there be a real and permanent improvement. 'Small measures do not merely produce small effects; they produce no effect at all.' Go to the root of the matter; nothing but a new era, bringing in a new political and social constitution, will cure the fever - sores that are now malignant, and that are bound, in ever-increasing malignity, to spread."

This protest interprets that mass of opinion which is usually designated Socialistic. The term Socialism has not been in current use for more than between sixty and seventy years,1 but the ideas that it crystallises have, in a kind of nebulous form, influenced minds in all ages. They found expression in the democracy of

1 “It is a disputed point whether it first arose in the school of Owen, or was invented by Pierre Leroux, the author of a system known as 'Humanitarianisn,' or had for author Louis Rebaud, a well-known publicist and a severe critic of socialism."-Flint on Socialism, p. II.

Greece, and in both the Republic and the Empire of Rome. In the ecclesiastical system of the middle ages-with its monastic brotherhoods and its religious orders, with the guilds and fraternities that it sanctioned, even the feudalism that flourished in its midst - there were anticipations of the theories with which we are familiar. But these theories assumed more distinct proportions towards the dawn of the nineteenth century. The way for them had been prepared by the French Encyclopædists, and by authors of varying hues of thought. Rousseau had sung the praises of a state of nature when there was no private property on the earth, and when all men were equal. Baboeuf had propounded the scheme that may be regarded as the rough draft of developed socialism-the scheme of a democracy in which all inequalities shall be abolished, all superfluities cut off, and all property transferred to Government, to be distributed to every citizen

1 "The Greek theory, though it likewise regards the State as a means to certain ends, regards it as something more. According to it, no department of life is outside the scope of politics; and a healthy State is at once the end at which the science aims, and the engine by which its decrees are carried out."-The Greek Theory of the State. By Charles John Shebbeare.

2 The Christian name was Joseph. Inasmuch as he had no admiration of the Joseph of Scripture, he renounced the name and substituted for it Caius Gracchus.

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according to his need. These conceptions of civil society and its structure and objects were stirring the thoughts of men before the French Revolution, and during its stormy period in 1793. And thereafter, in Saint Simon, Proudhon, Fourier, Louis Blanc, and others, French socialism was provided with an eloquent advocacy and an active missionary propaganda.

But it was not until the nineteenth century was well advanced that this type of view assumed a distinct economical outline, and was embodied in distinct organisations. Prior to that date, men like Robert Owen had projected communistic societies; and ardent spirits, such as Coleridge and Wordsworth, during the brief period of their enthusiasm for "liberated France," had sketched ideal pantisocracies. But it was after Waterloo had been fought, it was when Europe was suffering from depressions and reactions subsequent to long years of war, unrest, and drainage of resources, that the master minds of the new movement appeared. And not France, but Germany, gave the mightiest impulse- the chief priests of the movement being Karl Marx1 and Lassalle,2

1 Born at Trèves, in 1818.

2 Born at Breslau, in 1825. The epitaph on his tomb is "Ferdinand Lassalle, thinker and fighter."

both of them of Jewish origin. They had imbibed the teaching of the new Hegelian school of Philosophy; and they fittingly represented Germany-" too thorough," as Marx says, "to be able to revolutionise without revolutionising from a fundamental principle, and following that principle to its utmost limits.' "Therefore," as he adds, "the emancipation of Germany will be the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat."1 Marx expounded the fundamental principle; he, Lassalle, and their allies were ready to follow it to its utmost limits. What the principle is and what the limits are, all can read, mark, and learn in the Bible of the Socialist-the treatise of Marx on Capital.

When we turn to Great Britain, we can discern a preparation for the theories thus systematised in habitudes of philosophical thought which were developed in the nineteenth century, and in certain social features which the era of mechanical invention ushered in.

From the closing years of the eighteenth century many streams of tendency issued, whose effect was to modify both ethical and political opinion. A more liberal spirit had been infused into the popular theologies; the scepticism of

1 Article in the 'Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher.