History essay (why socialism)

389388 SOCIALIST

human race is capabb-into actual existence; it is training and of the human race to freedom.

This the true moral natule of the State, lmen, its from thetrue and mission. So much is this the case,

beginning o\time through the very force of. bvents it has more or less carried out by the State the exercise of will, and u :iously even against the

class, gentlemen, the k of its leaders. classes of theBut the

community in through the condition in which its members ffnd ways acquired the

placed as have al- instinct, that is is and must be the

duty of the State, to helirthe individ by means of the union of all to such a as he be incapable of. at- taining as an individual.

A State therefore which by the idea of the work- ing class, would no longer be , as all States have hitherto been, unconsciously and their will by the nature of things, and the force of moral nature of the State

but it would make this thus to form this society by impressing upon it'its own char-

that we have been a time which is destined to witness this the most glorious of history, and that we are Per- mitted to take a part lishing it.

But on all who working class the duty of tak- is imposed, if there is anY

Nothing is calculated to uponaclassaworthY that it is destined upon to raise the

principley'f its class to the principle of \entire age, to con- of society and

acter. . . .

FABIAN SOCIALISM

As the nineteenth century began drawing to a close it was inevitable that England too should have a socialist movement

-and it was just as inevitable that English socialism would be an original creation, distinct from the Continental sorts' The writings and preachings of such disparate reformers as Robert Owen, John Ruskin, William Morris, Charles Kingsley, T. H. Green, and the American Henry George had helped form the mind of the generation that came of age in the r88os. They had eloquently driven home the point that laissez-faire cap- italism was destroying the social and cultural life of the nation and that society would have to take measures at once to pro- tect itself.

This was the view of the small group of young men-all in their twenties-who, in 1884, founded the Fabian Society. In the same year they recruited the two men who wele to be the most famous apostles of Fabian Socialism, George Bernard

rn vt( lectur which we

been allotted the acfual existence.

,mmencement of mY r period of history in ng class, It is fhtis Pe-:--- ng class' It is ttl.rs Pe-

February, 1848, to which has this idea of the State into

te ourselves, gentlemen,

vision and complete checked desire and has only been wrung scanty and wills that were time does not connection of fight of the

with perfect clearness of would complete with r.rn-

, that which hitherto fragments from

to it, and lor DerV reason-though this necessary uce a soaring an amount of

and effect-it would spirit, a development

happiness, , well-being, and freedom hout example in the history, the world, and in comparison which, the most favou would

This man's

working of the

hich, as you see is just as difierent from the ion of the object of the State, as the principle the class, of the claim of. all to direct the will of the

or trniversal suffrage, is difierent from the principle held by Bourgeoisie, the census.

The series of ideas which I have explained to you must be regarded as the idea of the working class. It is this that I had

me to explain in

is, gentlemen, which must be called of the State, his conception of the

o{

ing up an entireff new att truth in what I Yave said.

39o socr-A Shaw and Sidney Webb. Shaw, born in Dublin in 1856, was then still an unsuccessful writer but was causing a stir in Lon- don as an exciting public speaker. Webb, twenty-ffve, a clerk in the Colonial Office, was dazzling everyone in his circle with his erudition in the social sciences. The early Fabians were generally well-educated and came from t-he middle or shabby genteel classes. Typically British, they were at once high- minded, practical, and moderate. They chose the term Fabian because the Roman general Fabius Maximus Cunctator de- Iiberately procrastinated in the war against Hannibal. The Fa- bians might have subscribed to the lines of the poet Thomas Gray:

Let none object my lingering way I gain, like Fabius, with delay.

They disseminated lheir ideas by pamphlets and public de- bate and by "permeatingi' parties or groups, a method that was most sucncessful in the Liberal Party and later the Inde- pendent Labor Party. They concerned themselves with such immediate practical problems as tax reform, women's rights, the eight-hour day, education, local government, etc., and leamed to master the prosaic arts of economics and statistics. Webb, rather than Shaw, embodied the soul of Fabian So- cialisrn.

The Fabians assumed, as Marx had, that the logic of capi- talism necessarily led to socialism. By socialism, however, they meant gradual social contrql, where possible by local and co- operative communities, over the means of production and dis- tribution. In their view laissez-faire capitalism had become at once unjust and inefficient. Perhaps too much, Fabians tended to equate the two, ffnding special moral virtue in the art or discipline of administration. They denied &e existence of class confict. Far from exalting the proletariat, they would have preferred a uniformly middle class society. Their economic principles, drawn mostly from the writings of David Ricardo and other liberal economists, were eclectic and unsystematic. Their strength lay in their moral fervor and in their unusual talents as writers, speakers, and men of affairs generally'

Fabian ideas called forth an immediate response from the

REVTSTONTSM 391 educated middle class of England, The movement spread rap- idly very soon after its ffrst book, Fabian Essags in Sociali'sm, appeared in r88g. In r8go the Society had r73 members; in r8g3 it had 64o members and 74 chapters. For about ten years thereafter it steadily declined, but then sharply rose again. By the ffrst decade of the twentieth century it had established deep and permanent roots in all levels of English society.

The excerpt is taken from a lecture delivered by Sidney Webb in 1888 and published six years later as Fabian Tract r.5.

ENcr-rss Pnocnsss rowARD Socrer. Douocnacv (r8S+)

There are three stages through which every new notion in England has to pass: It is impossible: It is against the Bible: We knew it before. Socialism is rapidly reaching the third of these stages. "We are all Socialists now," said one of Her Majesty's late Ministers; and, in sober truth, there is no anti- Socialist political party. That which has long formed part of the unconscious basis of our practice is now formulated as a deffnite theory, and the tide of Democratic Collectivism is roll- ing in upon us. All the authorities, whatever their own views, can but note its rapid progress. If we look back along the line of history, we see the irresistible sweep of the growing tend- ency: if we turn to contempolary industrial development, it is there: if we fly to biological science, we do not escape the lesson: on all sides the sociologic evolution compels our ad- herence. There is no resting place for stationary Toryism in the scientiffc universe. The whole history of t}le human race cries out against the old-fashioned Individualism.

Economic Science, at any rate, will now have none of it. When the Editor of the new issue of the Encyclopedia Britannica lately required from some eminent Economist an article on Political Economy, fully representing the present po- sition of that science, it was to an avowed Socialist that he ad- dressed himself, and the article took the form of an elrrborate survey of the inevitable convergence of all the economic tend-

392 SOCTALTST TIIOUGET

encies towards Socialism. Professor Alfred Marshall's new work will be as repugnant to Mr. Herbert Spencer and the Liberty and Property Defence League as John Stuart Mill's conversion was to his respectable friends. Have we not seen Professor Sidgwick, that most careful of men, contributing an article to the Contem.porarg Reoiew, to prove that the main principles of Socialism are a plain deduction from accepted economic doctrines, and in no way opposed to them?

Indeed, those who remember John Stuart Mill's emphatic adhesion to Socialism, both the name and the thing, in his "Autobiography," cannot be surprised at this tendency of economists. The only wonder is, that interested defenders of economic monopoly are still able to persuade the British pub- Iic that Political Economy is against Socialism, and are able to make even Bishops believe that its laws "forbid" anything save the present state of things.

It is, however, time to give a plain deffnition of Socialism, to prevent any mistake as to meanings. Nothing is more common than the statement, "I can t understand what Socialism is." But this is sheer intellectual laziness. The word is to be found in our modern dictionaries. The Encyclopedia Britannica con- tains exhaustive articles upon its every aspect. There are enough Socialist lectures in London every week, good, bad, and indifferent, to drive the meaning into every willing ear.

The abstract word "Socialism" denotes a particular principle of social organisation. We may deffne this principle either flom the constitutional or the economic standpoint. We may either put it as "the control by the community of the means of production for public advantage, instead of for private profft," or "the absorption of rent and interest by the community col- lectively," Its opposite is the abandonment of our means of production to the control of competing private individuals, stimulated by the prospect of securing the rent and interest gratuitously.

But this deffnition does not satisfy some people. They want a complete description of a Socialist State, an elaborateh worked out, detailed plan, like Sir Thomas More's "Utopia" or Gulliver's Travels. Such fancy sketches have, indeed, at times been thrown ofi by Socialists as by all other thinkers; but with

REVISIONISM 393 the growing realisation of social evolution, men gradually cease to expect the fabrication of a perfect and ffnal social state; and the dreams of Fourier and Cabet, like those of Godwin and Comte, become outworn and impossible to us. There will never come a moment when we can say, "Notp let us rest, for Socialism is established': any more than we say, "Noro Rad- icalism is established." The true principles of social organisa- tion must already have secured partial adoption, as a condi- tion of the continuance of every existing social organism; and the progress of Socialism is but their more complete recogni- tion and their conscious adoption as the lines upon which social improvement advances.

Looking back over the record of human progress, we see one main economic characteristic underlying every form of so- ciety. As soon as production is sufficiently advanced to furnish more than maintenance, there arises, wherever two or three are gathered together, a fferce struggle for the surplus product. This struggle varies in outward form according to the time and cireumstances, but remains essentially the same in eco- nomic character. The individuals or classes who possess social power, have at all times, consciously or unconsciously, made use of that power in such a way as to leave to the great ma- jority of their fellows practically nothing beyond the means of subsistence according to the current local standard' The addi- tional product, determined by the relative difierences in pro- ductive eficiency of the difierent sites, soils, capitals, and forms of skill above the margin of cultivation, has gone to those exercising control over these valuable but scarce produc-

tive factors. This struggle to secure the surplus or "economic

rent" is the key to the confused history of European progress' and an underlying, unconscious motive of all revolutions. The student of history ffnds that the great world moves, like the poet's snake, on its belly.

The social power which has caused this unequal division of the worker's product has taken various forms. Beginning, prob-

ably, in open personal violence in the merely preclatory stage of society, it has passed in one ffeld, through tribal war, to po- litical supremacy, embodied, for instance, in a "Jingo" foreign policy, and at home in vindictive class legislation. A survival

394 socrAlrsr rsoucET in England at the present time is the severity of tlle punish- ment for trifling ofiences against property compared with that for personal assaults; and its efiect is curiously seen when the Iegal respect for person and that for property are, to some ex- ten! opposed to each other, as in the case of wife-beating.

The social power does not, however, always take the forms of physical strength or political supremacy. From the Indian medicine man and tlle sun-priests of Peru down to the Col- lector of Peter's Pence and the Treasurer of the Salvation Armn theological influences have ever been used to divert a portion of the rent to spiritual uses, often nourishing (like the meats ofiered to idols) whole classes of non-producers, many of whom have been of no real spiritual advantage to the com- munity.

But by far the most important means of appropriating the su4llus product has been in the organisation of labor' The in- dustrial leader, who can oblige his fellows to organise their toil under his direction, is able thereby to cause an enormous in- crease in their productivity. The advantages of co-operative or associated labor were discovered long before they were described by Adam Smith or Fourier; and human history is the record of their ever-increasing adoption. Civilisation itseU is nothing but an ever-widening co-operation.

But who is to get the benefft of the increased productivity? In all times this question has been decided by the political condition of the laborer. The universally ffrst form of indus- hial organisation is chattel slavery. At a certain stage in social development there seems to have been possible no other kind of industrial co-operation. The renunciation of personal inde- pendence is, as Darwin observed of the Fuegian, the initial step towards civilisation.

As a slave, the worker obtained at ffrst nothing but bare maintenance at the lowest economic rate. Cato even advises the Roman noble that the bailifi or foreman need not have so large a ration as the other slaves, his work, though more skilled, being less exhausting. On the other hand, the surplus value was not yet differentiated into its component economic parts, and went in an undivided stream of profft all to the master.

REvrsroNrsM 395 Advancing civiUsation, itself rendered possible only by chat-

tel slavery, gradually made this form of servitude incompatible with intellectual and moral development, and inadequate to industrial needs. The slave became the feudal serf or dre tribal dependent. As a chattel he had ceded all but his maintenance to his master: as a serf he rendered to his lord three or four days' unpaid labor per week, maintaining himself on the prod-

uct of the rest. The further development of the social organism proved no

more favourable to feudalism than to chattel slavery; and the modern "free laborer" came into existence' But the economic servitude of the worker did not drop ofi with his feudal fetters. With the chains of innate status, there disappeared also its economic privileges; and the "free laborer" found himseU, especially in England, in a community where the old coilrmon rights over the soil were being gradually but efiectually ex- tinguished. He became a landless stranger in his own country.

ihe development of competitive production for sale, and the industrial revolution of the past century, have made sub- sistence dependent, not merely upon access to the land, but upon the use, in addition, of increasingly large masses of cap- ital, at ffrst in agriculture, then in foreign trade, then in manu- facture, and now, ffnally, also in distributive industries. The mere worker became steadily less and less industrially inde- pendent as his legal freedom increased. From an independent producing unit, he passed into a mere item in a vast induskial arrny, over the organisation of which he had no control. He was free, but free only to work at the market wage or to starve. Other resource he had none; and even now the freedom to work at all is denied to many at a time for varying periods, and we have the constantly recurring phenomenon of the un- employed. When it suits any person having the use of land and capital to employ the worker, he does so only on condition tllat two important deductions, rent and interest, can be made from the product for the gratuitous beneftt of those possessing the legal ownership of land and capital. The reward of labor being thus reduced on an average by at least one third, the remain- ing eightpence out of the shilling is then shared between the various classes who lwoe co-operated in the production, that

396 socral.rsr rHoucET is, the inventor, the managing employer, and the mere wage- worker-but in the competitive struggle it is shared in such a way that at least fourpence goes to a favoured set of educated workers numbering one-fffth of the whole, leaving four-fffths to divide less than fourpence out of the shilling between them. We have the direct consequence in the social condition around us. A forfunate few, owing to their legal power over the in- struments of wealth production, are able to command the serv- ices of thousands of indushial slaves whose faces they have never seen, without rendering any return whatever to them or to society. A Iarger body of persons contribute some labor, but are able, from their education or their cultivated ability, to choose occupations for which the competition wage is still high, owing to the relatively small number of possible com- petitors. These two classes together number only one-fffth of the whole. On the other side is the great mass of the people, the weekly wage-earners, four out of every ffve of the nation, toiling perpetually for less than a third of the aggregate prod- uct of labor, at an annual wage averaging at most 8g5 per adult, hurried into unnecessarily early graves by the severity of their lives, and dying, as regards, at least, one-third of them, destitute or actually in receipt of poor-law relief.

When we have bound the laborer fast to his wheel; when we have practically excluded the average man from every real chance of improving his condition; when we have virtually denied to him the means of sharing in the higher feelings and the larger syrnpathies of the cultured race; when we have shortened his life in our service, stunted his growth in our fac- tories, racked him with unnecessary disease by our exactions, tortured his soul with that worst of all pains, the constant fear of poverty, condemned his wife and children to sicken and die before his eyes, in spite of his own perpetual round of toil- then we are aggrieved that he often loses hope, gambles for the windfall that is denied to his industry, attempts to drown his cares in drink, and, driven by his misery irresistibly down the steep hill of vice, passes into that evil circle where vice begets poverty, and poverty intensiffes vice, until Society unre- lentingly stamps him out as vermin. Thereupon we lay the flattering unction to our souls that it was his own fault, that

REVTSTONTSM 397

he had his chance; and we preach to his fellows thrift and temperance, prudence and virtue, but always industry, that industry of others which keeps the industrial machine in mo- tion, so that we can still enjoy the opportunity of taxing it. Nay, so that we may not lose his labor, we keep him when we can from absolute starvation; and when the world has taken his all, we ofier him the pauper's dole. Nothing gives a more striking picture of his condition than the official statistics of our pauperism. We have clogged our relief with irksome and humiliating conditions, so that the poor often die linger- ing deaths rather than submit to them. . . .

Those who believe it possible that the festering evils of social ulceration can be cured without any fundamental change in property relations, rely mainly on three leading rem- edies, Trade Unions, Co-operation, and a general recrudes- cence of a Christ-like unselffshness. What does the dry light of science say to these homeopathic 'pills against the earth- quake"?

The belief in universal Trade Unionism as a means of greatly and permanently raising wages all round must be at once dismissed as involving a logical fallacy. Certainly, the workers in some trades have managed to improve their eco- nomic position by strict Trade Unions. We are never allowed to forget the splendid incomes earned by these aristocrats of labor, a mere tenth of the whole labor class. But those who merely counsel the rest to go and do likewise forget that the only permanently efiective Trade Union victories are won by limitation of the numbers in the particular trade, and the ex- cluded candidates necessarily go to depress the condition of the outsiders, The Trade Unionist can usually only raise him- self on the bodies of his less fortunate comrades. If all were equally strong, all would be equally powerless-a point clearly proved by Prof. Cairnes; and obvious to all Trade Unionists themselves.

Co-operation is a more seductive means of escape: and most social reformers cannot, even now, refrain from keeping alive lingering hopes that some solution may here be found. But a whole generation of erperiment has done little more than show the futility of expecting real help from this quarter. Less than

398 SOCIALIST TEOUGET

one four-hundredth part of the industry of the country is yet carried on by Co-operation. The whole range of industrial development in the larger industries seems against it; and no ground for hope in Co-operation as a complete answer to the social problem can be gained from economic science. .

There remains the ideal of the rapid spread of a Christlike unselffshness. Of this hope let us speak with all the respect which so ancient a dream deserves. If it were realised it would, indeed, involve an upset of present property arangements, compared with which Socialism is a mere trifle; yet science must perforce declare that the expectation of any but the slowest real improvement in general moral habit is absolutely without warrant. Forms of egoism may change, and moral habits vary; but, constituted as we are, it seems inevitable for healthy personal development that an at best instructed and unconscious egoism should preponderate in the individual. It is the business of the community not to lead into temptation this healthy natural feeling, but so to develop social institu- tions that individual egoism is necessarily directed to promote only the well-being of all. The older writers, led by Rousseau, in the reaction against aristocratic government, saw this neces- sary adjustment in absolute freedom. But that crude vision has long been demolished. "It is indeed, certain," sums up Dr. Ingram, "that industrial society will not permanently remain without a systematic organisation. The mere conflict of private interests will never produce a well-ordered commonwealth of Iabor."

fs there then no hope? Is there no chance of the worker ever being released from the incubus of what Mill called, "the great social evil of a non-laboring class, whose monopolies cause the taxation of the industrious for the support of indolence, if not of plunder?"

Mill tells us how, as he investigated more closely the history and structure of Society, he came to ffnd a sure and certain hope in the Progress of Socialism, which he foresaw and en- ergetically aided. We who call ourselves Socialists to-day in England, largely through Mills teaching and example, ffnd a conftrmation of this hope in social history and economics, and see already in the distance the glad vision of a brighter day,

REVTSToNTSM 399

when, practically, the whole product of labor will be the worker's and the worker's alone, and at last social arrange- ments will be deliberately based upon the Apostolic rule ig- nored by so many Christians, that if a man do not work, nei- ther shall he eat.

But it must clearly be recognised that no mere charitable palliation of existing individualism can achieve this end. Against this complacent delusion of the philantbropist, Politi- cal Economy emphatically protests. So long as the instruments of production are in unrestrained private ownership, so long must the hibute of the workers to the drones continue: so long will the toilers' reward inevitably be reduced by their ex- actions. . . .

Where then is the Socialist hope? In the political power of the workers. The industrial evo-

lution has left them landless strangers in their own country; but the political evolution is about to make them its rulers. If unrestrained private ownership of the means of production necessarily keeps the many workers permanently poor without any fault on their part, in order to make a few idlers rich without any merit on theirs (and this is the teaching of eco- nomic science), unrestrained private ownership will inevita- bly go. In this country many successive inroads have already been made in it; and these constitute the Progress of Social- ism,

Three hundred years ago, for fear of the horde of "sturdy beggars," which even hanging had failed to extirpate, the wise Cecil was led to institute the general system of poor relief, a deduction from rent and interest for the benefft of tlose who were excluded from directly sharing in them. But the indus- trial evolution had not yet made this condition universal; and Iittle further progress was made in Socialism until the begin- ning of our century. Then, indeed, the acme of individualism was reached. No sentimental regulations hindered the free em- ployment of land and capital to the highest possible personal advantage, however many lives of men, women, and children were used up in the process. Capitalists still speak of that bright time with exultation. "It was not ffve per cent. or ten per cent.r" says one, 'but thousands per cent, that made the

400

fortune of Lancashire." But opinion turned against Laissez- faire fifty years ago. Mainly by the heroic efiorts of a young nobleman, who lately passed away from us as Lord Shaftes- bury, a really effective Factory Act was won; and the insatiate greed of the manufactnrers was restrained by political power, in the teeth of their most determined opposition. Since then the progress has been rapid. Slice after slice has, in the public interest, been cut ofi the proffts of land and capital, and there- fore ofi their value, by Mines Regulation Acts, Truck Acts, Factory Acts, Adulteration Acts, Land Acts. Slice after slice has been cut ofi the already diminished incomes of the classes enjoying rent and interest, by the gradual shifting of taxation from the whole nation as consumers of taxed commodities to the holders of incomes above I r5o, the average family income of the Kingdom. Step by step political power and political organisation have been used for industrial ends, until a Minis- ter of the Crown is the largest employer of labor in the coun- try, and at least 2oo,ooo men, not counting the army and navy, are directly in the service of the community, without the intervention of the profft of any middleman. All the public needs supplied by the labor of these public servants were at one time left to private enterprise, and were a source of legiti- mate individual investment of capital. Step by step the com- munity has absorbed them, wholly or partially; and the area of private exploitation has been lessened. Parallel with this progressive nationalisation or municipalisation of industry, a steady elimination of the purely personal element in business management has gone on. The older economists doubted whether anything but banking could be carried on by joint- stock enterprise: now every conceivable industry, down to baking and milk-selling, is successfully managed by the sal- aried officers of large corporations of idle shareholders. More than one-third of the whole business of England, measured by the capital employed, is now done by joint-stock compa- nies, whose shareholders could be expropriated by the com- munity with little more dislocation of industry than is caused by the daily purchase of shares on the Stock Exchange,

Besides its direct supersession of private enterprise, the State now registers, inspects, and controls nearly all the industrial

nEvrsroNrsM 4OL functions which it has not yet absorbed. The inspection is often detailed and rigidly enforced. The State in most of the larger industrial operations prescribes the age of the worker, the hours of work, the amount of air, light, cubic space, heat, lavatory accommodation, holidays, and meal-times; where, when, and how wages shall be paid; how machinery, stair- cases, Iift-holes, mines, and quarries are to be fenced and guarded; how and when the plant shall be cleaned, repaired, and worked. Even the kind of package in which some articles shall be sold is duly prescribed, so that the individual capital- ist shall take no advantage of his position. On every side he is being registered, inspected, controlled; eventually he will be superseded by the community, and he is compelled in the meantime to cede for public purposes an ever-increasing share of his rent and interest.

This is the rapid progress of "Collectivism" which is so noticeable in our generation. England is already the most Socialist of all European communities, though the young Em- peror of Germany is now compelled by the uneasy ground swell of German politics to emulate us very closely. English Collectivism will, however, inevitably be Democratic-a real "Social Democracy" instead of the mere Political Democracy with which Liberals coquet. As the oldest industrial country, we are likely to keep the lead, in spite of those old-fashioned politicians who innocently continue to regard Socialism as a dangerous and absolutely untried innovation. Are there not still, in obscure nooks, disbelievers and despisers of all science? The schoolmaster never penetrates into all the corners in the same generation.

But some will be inclined to say, 'This is not what we tlought Socialism meant. We imagined that Socialists wanted to bring about a sanguinary confict in the streets, and then the next day to compel all dehcately nurtured people to work in the factories at a ftxed rate of wages."

It is not only in the nursery that bogey-making continues to be a very general though quite unnecessary source of anxiety. Socialists do but foretell the probable direction of English social evolution; and it needs nothing but a general recogni- tion of that development, and a clear determination not to

4o2 socrAlrsr rHouGET allow the selffsh interests of any class to hinder or hamper it, for Socialism to secure universal assent. All other changes will easily flow from this acquiescent state of mind, and they need not be foreshadowed in words.

"But will not Socialism abolish private property?" It will certainly seriously change ideas concerning that which the community will lend its force to protect in the personal en- joyment of any individual.

It is already clear that no really democratic government, whether consciously Socialist or not, will lend its soldiers or its police to enforce the "rights" of such an owner as Lord Clanricarde. Even Matthew Arnold declared the position of the mere landlord to be an "anachronism," "Landlordism" in Ireland is admittedly doomed, and opinion in England is rapidly ripening in favour of collective control over the soil. The gradual limitation of the sphere of private property which has been steadily taking place will doubtless continue; and just as courts of justice, private mints, slaves, public ofices, pocket boroughs, votes, army commissions, post ofices, tele- graph lines, and now even continental telegraph cables landing on English shores, have ceased to be permissible personal possessions, so will the few remaining private gasworks, water- works, docks, tramways, and schools be quickly absorbed, and an end be also made to private railways and town ground- rents. Ultimately, and as soon as may be possible, we look to see this absorlption cover all land, and at least all the larger forrns of industrial capital. In these, as Herbert Spencer pointed out forty years ago as regards land, private ownership will eventually no more be possible than it is now in a post ofice or a court of justice, both of which were once valuable sources of individual proftt. Beyond the vista of this extension of collectivism, it is at present unnecessary to look; but we may at any rate be sure that social evolution will no more stop there than at any previous stage.

This is the Progress of Socialism. To an ever growing num- ber of students of history and sciencr, its speedy acceleration appears at once our evident destiny and our only hope, Po- litical Economy, at least, whatever the economist may think of Socialism, now recognises no other alternative. So long as

land and industrial capital remain in unrestrained private ownership, so long *ntt 'th" subjection of labor to capital, and the enormous share which the possessors of the instru- ments of industry are able to take from the produce" inevi- tably continue, and even increase. The aggregate product may

"o.,ii.to" to grow; but 'the remuneration of labor as such,

skilled or unskilled, can never rise much above its present level."

The onlg efiectual means of raising the material condition of the great mass of the people, is for them to resume, through their own public organisations, that conhol over their own industry *hi"h ittdntttial evolution has taken from them, and to entei collectively into the enjoyment of the fertile lands and rich mines from which they are now so relentlessly ex- cluded. This is the teaching of economic science; and, how- ever little individual economists may relish the application, the workers are rapidly coming to appreciate it.

In this direction, too, is the mighty sweep and tendency of social evolution. Without our knowledge, even against our will, we in England have already been carried far by the ir- resistible wave. What Canute will dare to set a limit to its advanceP One option we have, and one only. It is ours, if we will, to recognise a rising force, to give it reasonable expres- sion, nay, within limits, even to direct its course' This is why we are Socialists, and why you must become so. For if the conscious intelligence of the natural leaders of the community lag behind the coming thought; if it ignore the vast social forces now rapidly organising for common action; if it leave poverty and repression and injustice to go on breeding their inevitable births of angry brutality and ferce revenge: dten, indeed, social evolution may necessarily be once more aclcom- plished by social cataclysm. From this catastrophe, our gradual adoption of Social Democracy is the path of escape.

-/z' -\ ///p\feunhs (185e-1e14) ,/\

Jean Jaurds *6 the\|standing French socialist in the halcyon yearwfef,ore Wo\-ld-yar I. He expressed more elo-

NEVISIONISM 403