CHAPTER II. THE PROGRESS AND PRESENT POSITION OF SOCIALISM.

Socialism being now revolutionary social democracy, we should expect to find it most widely and most acutely developed in those countries where, 1st, the social condition of the lower classes is most precarious, or, in other words, where property and comfort are ill distributed; 2nd, where political democracy is already a matter of popular agitation; and, 3rd, where previous revolutions have left behind them an unquiet and revolutionary spirit—a "valetudinary habit," as Burke calls it, "of making the extreme medicine of the State its daily bread." That is very much what we do find. All these conditions are present in Germany—the country in which socialism has made the most remarkable and rapid advance. Dr. Engel, head of the Statistical Bureau of Prussia, states that in 1875 six million persons, representing, with their families, more than half the population of that State, had an income less than £21 a year each; and only 140,000 persons had incomes above £150. The number of landed proprietors is indeed comparatively large. In 1861 there were more than two millions of them out of a population of 23,000,000; and in a country where half the people are engaged in agriculture this would, at first sight, seem to offer some assurance of general comfort. But then the estates of most of them are much too small to keep them in regular employment or to furnish them with adequate maintenance. More than a million hold estates of less than three acres each, and averaging little over an acre, and the soil is poor. The consequence is that the small proprietor is almost always over head and ears in debt. His property can hardly be called his own, and he pays to the usurer a much larger sum annually as interest than he could rent the same land for in the open market. More than half of these small estates lie in the Rhine provinces alone, and the distressed condition of the peasantry there has been lately brought again before the attention of the legislature. But while thus in the west the agricultural population suffers seriously from the excessive subdivision of landed property, they are straitened in the eastern and northern provinces by their exclusion from it. Prince Bismarck, speaking of the spread of socialism in a purely agricultural district like Lauenburg, which had excited surprise, said that this would not seem remarkable to any one who reflected that, from the land legislation in that part of the country, the labourers could never hope to acquire the smallest spot of ground as their own possession, and were kept in a state of dependence on the gentry and the peasant proprietors. Half the land of Prussia is held by 31,000 persons; and emigration, which used to come chiefly from the eastern provinces, where subdivision had produced a large class of indigent proprietors, proceeds now predominantly from the quarters where large estates abound. The diminution of emigration from the Rhine provinces is indeed one cause of the increase of distress among the peasant proprietary; but why emigration has ceased, when there seems more motive for it, is not so clear. As yet, however, socialism has taken comparatively slight hold of the rural population of Germany, because they are too scattered in most parts to combine; but there exists in that country, as in others, a general conviction that the condition of the agricultural labourers is really a graver social question than the condition of the other industrial classes, and must be faced in most countries before long. Socialism has naturally made most way among the factory operatives of Germany, who enjoy greatest facilities for combination and mutual fermentation, and who besides, while better off in respect to wages than various other sections of workpeople, are yet the most improvident and discontented class in the community. Then, in considering the circumstances of the labouring classes in Germany, it must be remembered that, through customs and indirect taxation of different kinds, they pay a larger share of the public burdens than they do in some countries, and that the obligation of military service is felt to be so great a hardship that more than a third of the extensive emigration which now takes place every year from the German Empire is prompted by a desire to escape it. Before the establishment of the Empire, only about a tenth part of the emigrants left the country without an official permit; but the proportion has been rising every year since then, and sometimes comes to nearly a half.

Under these circumstances neither the strength nor the progress of the Social Democratic party in that country affords occasion for surprise. At the last general election, in February, 1890, this party polled more votes than any other single party in the Empire, and returned to the Imperial Diet a body of representatives strong enough, by skilful alliances, to exercise an effective influence on the course of affairs. The advance of the party may be seen in the increase of the socialist vote at the successive elections since the creation of the Empire.

In 1871 it was	101,927.
"  1874    "	351,670.
"  1877    "	493,447.
"  1878    "	437,438.
"  1881    "	311,961.
"  1884    "	549,000.
"  1887    "	774,128.
"  1890    "	1,427,000.

The effect of the coercive laws of 1878, as shown by these figures, is very noteworthy. In consequence of the successive attempts made in that year on the life of the Emperor William by two socialists, Hoedel and Nobiling, Prince Bismarck determined to stamp out the whole agitation with which the two criminals were connected by obtaining from the Diet exceptional and temporary powers of repression. The first effect of these measures was, as was natural, to disorganize the socialist party for the time. Hundreds of its leaders were expelled from the country; hundreds were thrown into prison or placed under police restriction; its clubs and newspapers were suppressed; it was not allowed to hold meetings, to make speeches, or to circulate literature of any kind. In the course of the twelve years during which this exceptional legislation has subsisted, it was stated at the recent Socialist Congress at Halle, that 155 socialist journals and 1200 books or pamphlets had been prohibited; 900 members of the party had been banished without trial; 1500 had been apprehended and 300 punished for contraventions of the Anti-Socialist Laws. These measures paralyzed the old organization sufficiently to reduce the Socialist vote at the next election in 1881 by thirty per cent.; but the party presently recovered its ground. It adapted itself to the new conditions, and established a secret propaganda which was manifestly quite as effective for its purposes as the old, and charged with more danger to the State. Its vote increased immensely at each successive election thereafter; and now, as Rodbertus prophesied, the social question has really proved "the Russian campaign of Bismarck's fame," for his policy of repression has ended in tripling the strength of the party it was designed to crush, and placing it in possession of one-fifth of the whole voting power of the nation. It was high time, therefore, to abandon so ineffectual a policy, and the socialist coercive laws expired on the 30th September, 1890, and the socialists inaugurated a new epoch of open and constitutional agitation by a general congress at Halle in the beginning of October.

The strength of the party in Parliament has never corresponded with its strength at the polls. In 1871 it returned only 1 member to the Diet; in 1874, 9; in 1877, 12; in 1878, 9; in 1881, 12; in 1884, 24; in 1887, 11; and in 1890, with an electoral vote which, under a system of proportional representation, would have secured for it 80 members, it has carried only 37. The party has no leaders now, in Parliament or out of it, of the intellectual rank of Lassalle or Marx; but it is very efficiently led. Its two chiefs, Liebknecht and Bebel, are well skilled both in debate and in management, and have for many years maintained their authority in a party peculiarly subject to jealousy and intrigue, and have consolidated its organization under very adverse conditions. Liebknecht, who is a journalist of most respectable talents, character, and acquirements, is now the veteran of the movement, having been out in the '48 and passed twelve years of political exile in London in constant intercourse with Karl Marx. Bebel, a turner in Leipzig, is a much younger man, and, indeed, is one of Liebknecht's converts, for he opposed the movement when it was first started in Leipzig by Lassalle; but he has fought so long and so stout a battle for his cause that he too seems now one of its veterans. The other parliamentary leaders of the party are for the most part still under thirty. Von Volmar, a military officer who has left the service for agitation and journalism, seems to be the older leaders' chief lieutenant; and Frohme, a young littérateur of repute, may be mentioned because he heads a tendency to more moderate policy.

Owing to the paucity of its representatives, the party has hitherto made little attempt to initiate legislation. No bill can be introduced into the German Diet unless it is backed by fifteen members; and, except in the Parliament of 1884-7, the Socialist party never had fifteen members until last February. The work of its parliamentary representatives, therefore, has consisted mainly of criticism and opposition, and seizing every suitable occasion for the ventilation of their general ideas; but after the election of 1884, when they returned to the Diet twenty-four strong, they introduced first a bill for the prohibition of Sunday labour, which was stoutly opposed by Prince Bismarck, and defeated; and second, a Labourer's Protection Bill, proposing to create an elaborate organization for securing the general wellbeing of the working class. It was to create, first, a new Labour Department of State; second, a series of Workmen's Chambers, one for every district of 200,000 or 400,000 inhabitants, with the necessary number of local auxiliaries; third, Local Courts of Conciliation for the settlement of differences between labourers and employers, from whose decision there should be an appeal to the Workmen's Chamber of the District. Both the Court of Conciliation and the Workmen's Chamber were to be composed of an equal number of employers and employed. The connection between the Workmen's Chambers of the District and the Minister of Labour would be through District Councils of Labour, the members of which were to be chosen by the minister out of a list presented by the Workmen's Chamber of the District, and containing twice the number of names required to fill the places. It was to be the duty of these Councils of Labour to send a report every year to the Labour Department in Berlin on the condition of labour in their respective districts after an annual inspection of all the factories, workshops, and industrial establishments of any kind located there. The Workmen's Chambers were to have a wide rôle, and were the keystone of the system. Besides being the courts of final appeal in labour disputes, they were to bring to the knowledge of the competent authorities the existence of any disorders or grievances that occurred in industrial life; to give advice on the best laws and regulations for industry; to undertake inquiries into all matters affecting the conditions of labour, treaties of commerce, taxes, rates of wages, technical education, housing, prices of subsistence, etc.

In introducing the bill, its promoters said a chief object of the whole organization was to obtain for working men higher wages for a shorter day's work, and they proposed the immediate reduction of the day of labour to eight hours for miners and ten hours for all other trades, together with some further limitations on the work of women and children, the abolition of prison work at ordinary trades, and of Sunday work, and the requirement of the payment of wages weekly, and their payment in money. The bill was referred to a committee of the House, and rejected, after that committee brought up an unfavourable report in February, 1886, and nothing further has been done in the matter since; but the Minister of the Interior was so much struck with the unexpectedly moderate and practical character of its proposals that he said if these proposals expressed the whole mind of the members who proposed them, then those members might as well sit on the right side of the House as on the left. The effect of the bill, as far as it was workable, would merely be to give the working class a real and systematic, but not unequal, voice in settling the conditions of their own labour; and its rejection is to some extent an example of the way the socialist agitation impedes the cause of labour by creating in the public mind an unnecessary distrust even of reasonable reforms.

There are some questions of general policy on which the socialist deputies take up a position of their own. They always oppose the military budget, because, like socialists everywhere, they are opposed to all war and armaments. Wars are merely quarrels of rulers, for peoples would make for peace, and armaments only drain the people's pockets in order to perpetuate the people's oppression. Then they are opposed to national debts, because national debts enable rulers to carry on war. They are opposed to the new colonization policy of the Empire, because in their opinion it is a policy of aggrandisement and conquest undertaken under hypocritical pretences. They are opposed to protective duties, because they dislike indirect taxation, as bearing always unjustly on the labouring class. They are strong supporters of popular education, but they opposed the new insurance laws because they feared these laws would place people too much under the power of the Government, for their jealousy of the Government that exists corrects their general partiality for Government control, and tends to keep them back even from some of the minor excesses of State-socialism.

The moderate and apparently temporizing policy of the deputies is a constant source of dissatisfaction to the wilder and more inexperienced members of the party, who complain, as they did at the recent Halle Congress, that trying to improve the present system of things is not the best way of subverting it, and who will either have socialism cum revolution, or they will have nothing at all. But the older heads merely smile, and tell them the hour for socialism and revolution is not yet, that no man knows when it shall be, and that in the meantime it would be mere folly for socialists to refuse the real comforts they can get because they think they have ideally a right to a great deal more. "Why," said Bebel, when he was charged at Halle with countenancing armaments in violation of socialist principles by voting for a better uniform to the soldiers,—"why, there are numbers of Social Democrats in the Reserve, and was I to let them die through inadequate clothing merely because I object to armaments as a general principle?"

They of course think of this policy of accommodation as only a temporary necessity, till they become strong enough to be thoroughgoing; but there is perhaps better reason to believe it to be an abiding and growing necessity of their position, for they are finding themselves more and more obliged, if they are to become stronger at all, or even to keep the strength they have, to bid for the support of aggrieved classes by working for the immediate removal of their grievances, and thus to keep on reducing day by day as it rises the volume of that social discontent which is to turn the wheel of revolution. It is not unlikely that the socialist party, now that it is sufficiently powerful to do something in the legislature, but not sufficiently powerful to think of final social transformation, will occupy themselves much more completely with those miscellaneous social reforms in the immediate future; that they will thereby become every day better acquainted with the real conditions on which social improvement depends; that they will find more and more satisfying employment in the exercise of their power of securing palpable, practical benefits, than in agitating uncertain theoretical schemes; and, in short, that they will settle permanently into what they are for the present to some extent temporarily, a moderate labour party, working for the real remedy of real grievances by the means best adapted, under real conditions, national or political, for effecting the purpose.

The programme of the party, which was adopted at the Gotha Congress of 1875, after the union of the Marxist socialists and the Lassalleans, and has remained unaltered ever since, has always consisted of a deferred part and an actual. It contains, in fact, three programmes—the programme for to-day, the programme for to-morrow, and the programme for the day after to-morrow. The last is of course the socialist State of the future, at present beyond our horizon altogether. Before it appears there is to be a more or less prolonged period in which individual management of industry is to be gradually superseded by co-operative societies founded on State credit; but this intermediate state was only made an article of the programme to conciliate the Lassalleans, and one hears less of productive associations to-day from the German socialists than from the French. The Germans would apparently prefer to go from private property to public property direct rather than go viâ corporate property; but in any case their programme leaves the creation of productive societies to a future period, and their task for the present is to secure for working men factory and sanitary legislation, constitutional liberties, and an easier and more equitable system of taxation.

The programme is as follows:—

"I. Labour is the source of all wealth and civilization, and since productive labour as a whole is made possible only in and through society, the entire produce of labour belongs to society, that is, it belongs by an equal right to all its members, each according to his reasonable needs, upon condition of a universal obligation to labour.

"In existing society the instruments of labour are the monopoly of the capitalist class; the dependence of the labouring class which results therefrom is the cause of misery and servitude in all forms.

"The emancipation of labour requires the conversion of the instruments of labour into the common property of society, and the management of labour by association, and the application of the product with a view to the general good and an equitable distribution.

"The emancipation of labour must be the work of the labouring class, in relation to which all other classes are only a reactionary mass.

"II. Starting from these principles, the Socialistic Labour Party of Germany seeks by all lawful means to establish a free State and a socialistic society, to break asunder the iron law of wages by the abolition of the system of wage-labour, the suppression of every form of exploitation, and the correction of all political and social inequality.

"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany, although at first working within national limits, is sensible of the international character of the labour movement, and resolved to fulfil all the duties thereby laid on working men, in order to realize the brotherhood of all men.

"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands, in order to pave the way for the solution of the social question, the establishment by State help of socialistic productive associations under the democratic control of the workpeople. Productive associations for industry and agriculture should be created to such an extent that the socialistic organization of all labour may arise out of them.

"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands, as the basis of the State, (1) Universal, equal, and direct suffrage, together with secret and obligatory voting, for all citizens over twenty years of age, in all elections in State and commune. The election day must be a Sunday or holiday. (2) Direct legislation by the people. Decision on peace or war by the people. (3) Universal liability to military service. Militia instead of standing army. (4) Abolition of all exceptional laws, especially laws interfering with liberty of the press, of association, and of meeting; in general, all laws restricting free expression of opinion, free thought, and free inquiry. (5) Administration of justice by the people. Gratuitous justice. (6) Universal, compulsory, gratuitous, and equal education of the people by the State. Religion to be declared a private affair.

"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands within the conditions of existing society (1) The utmost possible extension of political rights and liberties in the sense of the above demands. (2) The replacement of all existing taxes, and especially of indirect taxes, which peculiarly burden the people, by a single progressive income tax for State and commune. (3) Unrestricted right of combination. (4) A normal working day corresponding to the needs of society. Prohibition of Sunday labour. (5) Prohibition of the labour of children, and of all labour for women that is injurious to health and morality. (6) Laws for protection of the life and health of workmen. Sanitary control of workmen's dwellings. Inspection of mines, factories, workshops, and home industry by officers chosen by working men. An effective employers' liability act. (7) Regulation of prison labour. (8) Entire freedom of management for all funds for the assistance and support of working men."

A committee was appointed at the recent Halle Congress to revise this programme and report to the Congress of 1891; but as the revision is merely intended to place the programme in greater conformity with the needs of the time, and keep it as it were up to date, only minor modifications may be expected, and those probably in the direction of a more practical and effectual dealing with existing grievances. Five years ago the party thought a ten hours' day corresponded with the needs of the time; they now ask for an eight hours' one. Instead of the prohibition of Sunday labour, they now prefer to demand, as a more workable equivalent, a period of thirty-six hours' continuous and uninterrupted rest every week, irrespective of any particular day; and they have sometimes taken up new working-class questions not especially mentioned in their programme, or included directly under any of its heads, like the abolition of payment of wages in kind. The whole spirit of the late Congress leads us to look for the contemplated modifications in this direction of meeting more effectually immediate working-class wants.

Many eyes were upon that Congress; for it was the first the German socialists had held since they had recovered their freedom and proved their strength. They were now clearly stronger than any socialist party the world had yet seen, and much stronger than most revolutionary parties who have made successful revolution. Would then the word now be revolution? people asked. It was not: the word was caution. The first effect of the victory in February had been otherwise, and in June, Herr Bebel was still calling, Steady. "The majority of his party colleagues," he said at a public meeting in Berlin on the 20th of that month, "had been intoxicated by the result of the elections of February 20th, and believed they could do what they liked with the middle class, as it was already on the point of going under." But before October steadier counsels prevailed, and the spirit of the Congress was moderation itself. Although the Congress did not agree to the motion to restore to the party programme the phrase "by lawful means," which had been deleted from the opening paragraph of the second part of it by the Wyden Congress of 1880, in consequence of the Anti-Socialist Laws no longer giving them any choice except recourse to unlawful means, the general and decided feeling of the Congress certainly was that only lawful means could now answer their purposes. The controversy was repeatedly raised by an extreme section of the party from Berlin, who complained that the work of their parliamentary representatives had hitherto entirely ignored the real aims of social democracy, and that a return should now be made to its socialism and its revolution. But the voice of the meeting was invariably against this Berlin movement. There was a time, said M. Fleischman—and his speech was applauded—when it was counted the right thing in the party to make revolutionary speeches, and point to the coming day of account when mankind were to be emancipated at one blow; but that was not a road they could make any progress by. And as for boycotting, which had been spoken of, he declared he was all for boycotting; but it was the boycotting of the military in such a way as to give them no occasion for the use of their weapons. Liebknecht, the chief leader of the party, followed, and was quite as emphatic in the same line. People spoke of revolution, he said; but they should remember that roast pigeons don't fly into one's mouth by themselves. It was easy enough to make bitter speeches, and any fool and donkey could throw bombs; but the misadventures of the anarchists showed plainly enough that nothing could be done in that way. The socialists had now 20 per cent. of the population; but what could 20 per cent. do against 80 per cent. by the use of force? No, it was not force; it was reason they must use if they would succeed. What, then, he asked, was the Social Democracy to do? They must avoid divisions among themselves, and go out and convert the still indifferent masses. The electoral suffrage was their best weapon of agitation, and their surest means of increasing the party. Prince Bismarck had been represented in a popular book as practising peasant-fishery and elector-fishery. "Peasant-fishery and elector-fishery—" said Liebknecht, amid much applause, "that is the word for the Social Democrats to-day."

Another suggestion of the extreme section was that the party should now assail the Church and religion, as socialist and revolutionary parties have so generally done; but this bit of their old traditional policy received scant regard from the Halle Congress. A strong feeling was expressed that the party had damaged itself in the past by its assaults on the Church, and that its present policy ought, in self-preservation, to be one of religious neutrality and toleration. "Instead," said Liebknecht, "of squandering our strength in a struggle with the Church and sacerdotalism, let us go to the root of the matter. We desire to overthrow the State of the classes. When we have done that, the Church and sacerdotalism will fall with it, and in this respect we are much more radical and much more definite in purpose than our opponents, for we like neither the priests nor the anti-priests." The old revolutionary policy of stirring up hatred against all existing institutions is thus relegated from the present to the distant future, after the present class-State is overthrown and the working-class or socialist State established in its place.

"Well, then," suggested another old-world socialist, "let us, at any rate, issue a pamphlet describing the glories of this socialist State, and get the people prepared to flock into it"; but this suggestion was also frowned down. "For," said Liebknecht, "who could say what the Zukunft Staat—the socialist State of the future—is to be? Who could foresee so much as the development of the existing German State for a single year?" In other words—I think I am not misinterpreting their meaning—the State of the future is the concern of the future; the business of a living party is within the needs and within the lines of the living present.

What, then, is to be the business of this formidable Social Democratic party? Peasant-catching is the word. The elections showed that while the party was very strong in the large towns, it was very weak in the rural districts, and among special populations like the Poles and Alsatians; and although previous revolutionists thought everything was gained if the large towns were gained, the Social Democrats generally admit that the social revolution is impossible without the adherence of the peasantry. The peasants, therefore, must be won over to the party. Once in the party, they may learn socialism and revolution, but they must first be brought in, and for that purpose there must be started a special peasants' cry—a cry, that is, for the redress of some immediate grievance of that class; and one suggestion made at the Congress was, that the cry for the peasantry should be the abolition of the German Gesinde (farm-servant) system. In the same spirit the Congress recommended the parliamentary party to take up the question of seamen's rights, and agitate for better regulations for securing the wellbeing of that class. The advance towards practicality is even more evident in their determination upon strikes. Hitherto, for the most part, socialists have either looked on strikes with lofty disdain as poor attempts to get a petty rise in wages instead of abolishing the present wages system altogether, or they have thrown themselves into strikes for the mere purpose of fomenting labour troubles, and breaking perchance the power of the large capitalist class; and this latter view was not unrepresented at the Halle Congress. The resolution of the Congress, however, declared (1st) that strikes and boycotting were often useful means of improving the social position of the labouring class; but (2nd) that they were to be resorted to even for that purpose with great circumspection. "Whereas, however, strikes and boycotting are double-edged weapons which, when used in unsuitable places and at an inopportune moment, are calculated to do more harm than good to the interests of the working class, this Congress recommends German working men carefully to weigh the circumstances under which they purpose to make use of those weapons." The revolutionary ideal seems thus to be retreating—perhaps insensibly—in the socialistic mind into an eschatological decoration, into a kind of future Advent which is to come and to be believed in; but the practical concerns of the present must be more and more treated in their own practical way.

Since the Congress, the party has issued a manifesto to the peasantry, in which, after promising a new and happy day that is coming for them, which is to restore to them the beautiful earth and the poetry of life, they declare against the patriarchal system, and the increase of brandy distilling; and then, confessing that few socialists know anything about agricultural questions, invite information and discussion for the enlightenment of the party. Here again they forget that they have a theory which is as applicable to agriculture as to manufactures, and they want to make practical investigations with a view to practical solutions.

Of course the movement will always generate revolutionary elements as occasions arise, and these sometimes of the wildest character. Most and Hasselman, and their following, who were expelled at the Congress of Wyden in 1880, were anarchists of a violent type, and Mosts and Hasselmans may arise again. But at present anarchism hardly exists in Germany, and the Social Democratic party is peacefully trying to make people as comfortable as possible till the fulness of time arrives.

It may be added that the present income of the party, as stated at the last Congress, is £19,525, and that since February, 1890, they have established nineteen daily newspapers and forty weekly, with a total circulation of 254,000.

The socialist movement in other countries may be disposed of much more briefly, for in no other country has it worn anything like the same importance, except in Russia, and of the Russian agitation I shall treat more fully in a subsequent chapter on "Russian Nihilism." I may observe here, however, that the Russian agitation has not been without its influence on the nations of Western Europe. It was Bakunin who first kindled the socialist movements of Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Holland, and the anarchist fermentations of the last six years have been due in no inconsiderable measure to the new leaven of Russian ideas introduced by men like Prince Krapotkin and the two hundred other Russian refugees that are scattered abroad in the free countries of Europe.

In France there is much animated socialist agitation, but no solid and coherent socialist party such as exists in Germany. The movement is disunited and fragmentary, and confined almost entirely to the large towns, where many circumstances conspire to favour its growth. The French working class are born to revolutionary traditions. The better portion of them, moreover, though they long since gave up all belief in the old native forms of socialism, never ceased to be imbued with socialist ideas and aspirations; and M. de Molinari said in 1869, from his experience of French working men's clubs, that out of every ten French working men who had any interest beyond eating and drinking, nine were Socialists. Then there is in France a larger proportion of the working class than in most countries, who are kept in constant poverty and discontent and commotion by their own improvident habits. A pamphlet called "Le Sublime," which attracted considerable attention some years ago, stated that only forty per cent. of the working men of Paris were out of debt; and Mr. Malet reported to the English Foreign Office that they were, as a body, so dissipated that none of them had grandchildren or grandfathers. But, on the other hand, France enjoys a solid security against the successful advance of socialism in her peasant proprietors. Half the French population belong to that class, and their industry, thrift, and comfort have long been held up to our admiration by economists. According to M. de Lavergne, they are not so well fed, so well clad, or so well lodged as the farm labourers of England; but, living in a different climate, they have fewer wants, and are undoubtedly more contented. Among people like these, passing their days in frugal comfort and fruitful industry, and looking with quiet hope and confidence to the future, socialism finds, of course, no open door. On the contrary, every man of them feels he has something to lose and nothing to gain by social revolution; the fear of socialism is, indeed, one of the chief influences guiding their political action; and as they are as numerous as all the other classes in the community put together, their worldly contentment is a bulwark of enormous value to the existing order of things. The impression of their substantial independence is so marked that even the Frenchmen who were members of the International Working Men's Association would not assent to the abolition of a peasant proprietary, but always insisted, contrary to the principles of the Association, on the continued maintenance of that system as a necessary counterpoise to the power of the Government.

The present socialist groups and sects of France are all believers in the so-called scientific socialism of Marx and Lassalle, and the most important of them work for a programme substantially identical with that of Gotha. Marx's ideas were introduced among the French by the International, and they were adopted by a section of the Revolutionary Committee of the Paris Commune, 1871; but after the suppression of the Commune, they made so little stir for some years that Thiers declared, in his last manifesto as President of the Republic, that socialism, which was then busy in Germany, was absolutely dead in France. Its recrudescence was chiefly due to the activity of the Communards. Some of them had escaped to London, where they got into closer communion with Marx and his friends; and in 1874, thirty-four of these refugees, all military or administrative officers of the Commune, and most of them not professed socialists before, issued a manifesto pronouncing entirely for socialism, and describing the Commune as "the militant form of the social revolution"; but it was not till after the amnesty of the Communards, and their return from New Caledonia and elsewhere in 1880, that the first sensible ripple of socialist agitation was felt in France since the downfall of the second Republic. Numbers of socialist journals began to appear, and a general congress of working men, held at Havre in 1880, adopted a programme modelled on the lines of that of the German Social Democrats, and made preparations for an active propaganda and organization.

The adoption of the socialistic programme, however, rent the Congress in three, and the two opposite wings, the Co-operationists and the Anarchists, withdrew and established separate organizations of their own. The co-operationists, believing that the amelioration of the working class would only come by the gradual execution of practicable and suitable measures, and that these could only be successfully carried by means of skilful alliances with existing political parties, declared the Havre programme to be a programme for the year 2000, and that the true policy of the working-class now was a policy of possibilities. This last word is said to supply the origin of the term Possibilist, which has now come to be applied not to this co-operationist party, but to one of the two divisions into which the third or centre party of the Havre Congress—the socialists—shortly afterwards split up.

The co-operationists formed themselves into a body known as the Republican Socialist Alliance, which, as the name indicates, aims at social reforms under the existing republican form of State. They have held several congresses, their membership includes many well-known and even eminent Radical politicians—M. Clemenceau, for example—and they were supported by leading Radical journals, like Le Justice and L'Intransigeant; but their activity and their numbers have both dwindled away, probably because their work was done sufficiently well already by other political or working-class organizations.

The anarchists set up not a single organization, but a number of little independent clubs, which agree with one another mainly in their dislike of all constituted authority. They want to have all things in common, somehow or other; but for master or superior of any sort they will have none, be it king or committee. Their ideas find ready favour in France, because they are near allied with the theory of the Revolutionary Commune cherished among the Communards; and although there is no means of calculating their numbers exactly, they are believed to be pretty strong—at least, in the South of France. At the time of the Lyons Anarchist trial, at which Prince Krapotkin was convicted, they claimed themselves to have 8,000 adherents in Lyons alone. In 1886 the authorities knew of twenty little anarchist clubs in Paris, which had between them, however, only a membership of 1,500; and of these a considerable proportion were foreign immigrants, especially Austrians and Russians, with a few Spaniards. Some of these clubs are mainly convivial, with a dash of treason for pungency; but others have an almost devouring passion for "deeds," and are ever concerting some new method of waging their strange guerilla against "princes, proprietors, and parsons." When a new method is discovered, a new club is sometimes formed to carry it out. For instance, the Anti-propriétaires, which is said to be one of the best organized of the anarchist clubs, bind their members (1) to pay no house-rent,—rent, of course, being theft, and theft being really restitution; and (2) if the landlord at length resorts to law against any of them for this default, to come to their brother's help and remove his furniture to safer quarters before the moment of execution. The group La Panthère, to which Louise Michel belongs, and which has 500 members, and the group Experimental Chemie, as their names indicate, prefer less jocular methods. The best known of the anarchists are old Communards like Louise Michel herself and Élisée Reclus, the geographer.

The third section of the Havre Congress contained the majority of the 119 delegates, and they formed themselves into the Socialist Revolutionary Party of France, with the programme already mentioned, which was carried on the motion of M. Jules Guesde.

This programme sets out with the declaration that all instruments of production must be transferred to the possession of the community, and that this can only result from an act of revolution on the part of the working class organized as an independent political party, and then it goes on to say that one of the best means of promoting this end at present was to take part in the elections with the following platform:—

A. Political.

1. Abolition of all laws restricting freedom of the press, of association, or of meeting, and particularly the law against the International Working Men's Association. Abolition of "work-books."

2. Abolition of the budget of public worship, and secularization of ecclesiastical property.

3. Abolition of national debt.

4. Universal military service on the part of the people.

5. Communal independence in police and local affairs.

B. Economic.

1. One day of rest in the week under legal regulation. Limitation of working day to eight hours for adults. Prohibition of the labour of children under fourteen, and limitation of work hours to six for young persons between fourteen and sixteen.

2. Legal fixing of minimum wages every year in accordance with the price of provisions.

3. Equality of wages of male and female labour.

4. Scientific and technical training for all children, as well as their support at the expense of society as represented by the State and the Communes.

5. Support of the aged and infirm by society.

6. Prohibition of all interference on the part of employers with the management of the relief and sustentation funds of the working classes, to whom the sole control of these funds should be left.

7. Employers' liability guaranteed by deposit by employers proportioned to number of workmen.

8. Participation of the workmen in drawing up factory regulations. Abolition of employer's claim to punish the labourer by fines and stoppages (according to resolution of the Commune of 27th April, 1871).

9. Revision of all agreements by which public property has been alienated (banks, railways, mines, etc.). The management of all State factories to be committed to the workmen employed in them.

10. Abolition of all indirect taxes, and change of all direct ones into a progressive income tax on all incomes above 3,000 francs.

11. Abolition of the right of inheritance, except in the line of direct descent, and of the latter in the case of fortunes above 20,000 francs.

At the congress of the party held at St. Etienne two years after this programme was adopted, M. Brousse, a medical practitioner in Paris, and a member of the Town Council, who had already shown signs of disputing the leadership of M. Guesde, carried by a vote of thirty-six to twenty-seven a motion for introducing some modifications, and the minority seceded and set up a separate organization. In spite of repeated efforts at reconciliation, the two sections of the French socialists have never united again or been able even to work together temporarily at an election. Besides personal jealousies, there are most important differences of tendency keeping them apart. The Guesdists accept the policy of Karl Marx as well as his economic doctrine: the universal revolution, and the centralized socialist State, as well as the theory of surplus value and the right to the full product of labour. The Broussists, on the other hand, believe in decentralization, and would prefer municipalizing industries to nationalizing them. They are for giving the commune control of its own police, its own soldiers, its own civil administration, its own judiciary; and they think the régime of collective property can be best brought in and best carried on by local bodies. They would have the towns take over their own gas, light, and water supply, their omnibus and tramway traffic; but they would have them take over also many of the common industries which never tend towards monopoly or even call for any special control. They would municipalize, for example, the bakehouses and the mealshops and the granaries, apparently as supplying the necessaries of life, and they would have various other branches of industry undertaken by the towns to a certain limited extent, in order to provide suitable work for the unemployed. Then in 1887 they added a fresh plank to their platform, and asked for the establishment by municipalities, on public money or credit, of productive associations to be owned—not, like the other undertakings, by the municipality, but—by the working men employed in them. This is a reappearance of the old policy of Lassalle, with the difference that the productive associations are to be founded on municipal and not on State credit; and the reappearance is not surprising in France, because co-operative production has, on the whole, been more successful in that country than in any other. Then another of their demands is, that all public contracts should be subjected to such conditions as to wages and hours of labour as the workmen's syndicates approve; and in Paris they have already succeeded in obtaining this concession from the Town Council so far as municipal contracts are concerned. These workmen's syndicates are trade unions, which aim only at bettering the position of their members without theoretical prepossessions, but are quite as bold in their demands on the public powers as the socialists, and apparently more successful. In 1885 their claims included, not only an eight hours' day and a normal rate of fair wages, but the fixing of all salaries under 500 francs, a credit to themselves of 500,000,000 francs, and the gratuitous use of empty houses by their members; and in 1886 they obtained from the Town Council of Paris a furnished room, with free lighting and firing, and a subvention of 20,000 francs, for the establishment of a Labour Bureau, to be a centre for all working-class deliberations and intelligence, and a registry for the unemployed.

The socialism of the Broussists is thus practically a municipal socialism: municipal industries, municipal credit for working men's productive associations, municipal concessions to trade unions; but all this seems to the Guesdists to be mere tinkering, to be no better than the possibilities of the Republican Socialist Alliance, and they have for that reason given their rivals the name of Possibilists, which for distinction's sake they still commonly bear. Neither section had any representative in the Chamber of Deputies till 1889, when the Broussists succeeded in returning M. Joffrin; but the Broussists have nine in the Town Council of Paris. The Guesdists have more men of culture among them; Guesde himself and Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law, are both men of ability and public position; but they have a smaller following, and what they have is on the decline. Their sympathy with the principles of German Socialism, their alliance with the German Socialist party is against them, for the French working men have a very honest hatred of the Germans, both from recollections of the war and from the pressure of German industrial competition; and the feeling seems to be returned by the Germans, for it appeared even among the socialists at the recent congress at Halle, international and non-patriotic as socialists often claim to be. One of the personal accusations that disturbed the sittings of that congress was, that the leaders of the party had been discovered in secret conference with the delegates of the French socialists, MM. Guesde and Ferroul, who had been sent to greet their German comrades.

The Possibilists have no very eminent members, the most leading persons among them being Brousse himself and MM. Allemane and Joffrin. But they are not inconsiderable in number, and they are growing. They have 400 Circles of Social Studies all over the country, organized into six regions, each with its regular regional congress, and all working under a national executive committee and a general national congress, meeting once a year. The future of French socialism seems to be with the Possibilists rather than the Guesdists; and the future of the Possibilists, like the future of the German socialists, seems to lie in the direction of releasing their limbs from the dead clothes of socialist theory, in order to take freer and more practical action for the positive wellbeing of the working class. At the recent congress of the Possibilists at Châtellèrault in October, 1890, the chief questions discussed were the reform the system of poor relief and the eight hours' day. They want an international eight hours' day, but they would be willing to allow other four hours' overtime, to be paid for by double wages.

In 1885 the two divisions of socialists combined for electioneering purposes with one another and with a third revolutionary body called the Blanquists, and they actually formed together an organization known as the Revolutionary Union; but the three parties quarrelled again before the election, and the union was dissolved. The Blanquists are disciples of the veteran conspirator Blanqui, and include some well-known men, such as General Eudes, and MM. Vaillant and Roche. They are revolutionists pure and simple, and in some respects stand near the anarchists; only, being old birds, they move about more cautiously, and indeed are sometimes for that reason—and because they act as intermediaries between other revolutionaries—called the "diplomatists of lawlessness." With all their love for revolution, however, they have more than the usual democratic aversion to war, and their chief work at present is in connection with the league they have founded against permanent armies.

Although revolutionary socialism is so ill represented in the French Legislature, there is a special parliamentary party, known as the Socialist Group, which was founded by nineteen deputies in 1887, and returned thirty candidates to the Chamber at the election of 1889. They are for communal autonomy; for the transformation of industrial monopolies into public services, to be directed by the respective companies under the control of the public administration; and for the progressive nationalization of property, so as to make the individual employment of it accessible to free labourers; and they have no lack of other planks in their platform: international federation and arbitration; abolition of standing armies; abolition of capital punishment; universal suffrage; minority representation; sexual equality; free education, primary, secondary, and technical; suppression of the budget of public worship; separation of Church and State; absolute liberty to think, speak, write, meet, associate, and contract; abolition of indirect taxes and customs, and introduction of a progressive income tax, and a progressive succession duty; public crêches; establishment of superannuation, sick and accident insurance at public expense. Among the deputies who signed the programme in 1887 were the two Boulangists, MM. Laisant and Laur, and MM. Clovis Hughes, Basley, Bower, etc. The idea of the party seems to be what M. Laisant recommends in his "L'Anarchie Bourgeoise," published in the same year 1887, a Republican Socialist party, which, accepting the good works of socialism, without caring for its political or economic theory, shall do its best to abolish misery by any means open to it under the existing republican form of government. Republican socialism corresponds therefore to what is called State socialism in Germany—the abolition of poverty by means of the power of the present State; and the question between socialists and other reformers is narrowing in France, as elsewhere, into a question of the justice and the suitability of the individual measures proposed.

There is also a body of Christian Socialists in France, of whom, however, I shall have more to say in a subsequent chapter on the Christian Socialists.

Socialism crossed very early from Prussia into Austria and took quick root among the German-speaking population, but has never to this day made much way among any of the other nationalities in the Empire. The Magyars are, on the whole, fairly comfortable and contented in their worldly circumstances, and they have a strong national aversion to anything German, even a German utopia; so that they lent no ear to the socialist agitation till 1880, when a socialist congress of 119 delegates was held at Buda Pest and founded the Hungarian Labour Party. The agitation, however, has not assumed any important dimensions. The Poles of Austria, like the Poles of Russia and the Poles of Prussia, have all along been a source of much disappointment to socialist leaders, who expected they would leap into the arms of any revolutionary scheme, but find them too pre-occupied with their own nationalist cause to care for any other. The same observation applies to the Czechs. They are Czechs and Federalists first, and a social system under which they would cease to be Czechs and Federalists, and become mere atoms under a powerful centralized government, led possibly by Germans, is naturally not much to their fancy. But in the German-speaking part of the monarchy socialism has found a ready and general welcome, and has latterly grown most popular in the anarchist form. This development is due to various causes. The federalist ideas prevalent in the country would be a bridge to the general principles of anarchism, while the coercive laws in force since 1870 would naturally provoke a recourse to revolutionary methods and an impatience with the sober and Fabian policy of the Austrian Social Democrats. The Social Democrats of Austria were advised from the first by Von Schweitzer and Liebknecht, the leaders of German socialism at the time, to adopt this temporizing policy, as being on the whole the best for the party in the circumstances existing in their country. They were advised to give a general support at the elections to the Liberal party, because nothing could be done for socialism in Austria till the priestly and feudal ascendancy was abolished, and that could only be done by strengthening the hands of the Liberals. They have continued to observe this moderate course. Unlike their German comrades, they looked with favourable eyes on the labour legislation introduced by Government for improving the condition of the working classes; and though they have suffered from coercive legislation much longer and sometimes quite as severely, they have never struck the qualification "by legal means" out of their principles, but, on the contrary, have declared, when they were permitted to hold a meeting—as for example at Brünn in 1884—that they adhered entirely and exclusively to peaceful methods, and repudiated the deeds of the anarchists. But then they are apparently not prospering in number, while the anarchists are. For one thing they have never had good leaders, and though they sometimes invite Liebknecht or one of the German socialist leaders to come and rouse them, Government has always refused liberty for such addresses to be delivered in Austria. The anarchists, on the other hand, had an energetic and eloquent leader in Peukert, a house-painter, who is now a chief personage in anarchist circles in London, and from here no doubt still carries on relations with his old friends; and their propaganda seems to be spreading, if we judge from the political trials, and from the fresh measures of repression directed against it in 1884, when Vienna was put under siege, and again in the latter part of 1888. They have nine or ten newspapers, and the socialists six or seven. Neither faction has any representative in Parliament.

Both parties direct their chief attention to the peasantry, especially where any germ of an agrarian movement happens already to prevail. The Galician agitation against great landlords in 1886 was fomented by anarchist emissaries, and we occasionally hear of anarchist operations among the people of Northern Bohemia or Styria as well as in Upper Austria, where rural discontent has long been more or less acute. Austria is mainly an agricultural country; but greater part of the land is held in very large estates by the clergy and nobility, and the evils of the old feudal régime are only now being gradually removed. There are, it is true, as many as 1,700,000 peasant proprietors in the Cisleithanian half of the Empire alone; but then their properties are seriously encumbered by the debt of their redemption from feudal servitudes and by the severity of the public taxation. The land tax amounts to 26 per cent. of the proprietor's income, and the indirect taxes on articles of consumption are numerous and burdensome. But three-fourths of the rural population are merely farm servants or day labourers, and are worse off even than the same class elsewhere. The social question in Austria is largely agrarian, but the spontaneous movements of the Austrian peasantry seem rather unlikely to run in harness with social democracy. Unions of free peasants for example have sprung up of recent years in various provinces. Their great aim is to procure a reduction in the taxes paid by the peasantry; but then they add to their programme the principle of State-help to labour, the abolition of all feudal privileges and all rights of birth, gratuitous education, and cessation of the policy of contracting national debt, and they speak vaguely about instituting a peasant State, and requiring every minister and responsible official to serve an apprenticeship to peasant labour as a qualification for office, in order that he may understand the necessities and capacities of the peasantry. This idea of the peasant State is analogous to the idea of the labour State of the Social Democrats; but of course this is agreement which is really conflict. It is like the harmony between Sforza and Charles VIII.: "I and my cousin Charles are wonderfully at one; we both seek the same thing—Milan." The class interest of the landed peasant is contrary to the class interest of the working man, and would be invaded by social democracy. The peasantry are simply fighting for their own land, and as their votes are courted by both political parties they will probably be able to secure some mitigation of their grievances. Distress is certainly serious among them when, as happened a few years ago, in a parish of 135 houses as many as 35 executions were made in one day for failure to pay taxes, and in another of 250 houses as many as 72; but on the whole there seems to be little of that hopeless indigence which appears among the peasant proprietary in countries where the practice of unrestricted or compulsory subdivision of holdings exists, or has recently existed, to any considerable extent.

There is an influential Catholic Socialist movement in Austria, led by the clergy and nobility, and dealing in an earnest spirit with the social question as it appears in that country.

Socialism was introduced into Italy in 1868 by Bakunin, who, in spite of the opposition of Mazzini, gained wide acceptance for his ideas wherever he went, and founded many branches of the International in the country, which survived the extinction of the parent society, and continued to bear its name. They were, like Bakunin himself, anarchist in their social and political views, and were marked by an especial violence in their attacks on Church and State and family. They published a great number of journals of various sorts, and kept up an incessant and very successful propaganda; but no heed was paid them by the authorities till 1878, when an attempt on the life of the king led to a thorough examination being instituted into the whole agitation. The dimensions and ramifications of the movement were found to be so much more extensive than any one in power had anticipated, that it was determined to set a close watch thereafter on all its operations, and its meetings and congresses were then from time to time proclaimed. But after the passing of the Franchise Act of 1882, a new socialist movement came into being which looked to constitutional methods alone. The franchise was not reduced very low: it only gave a vote to one person in every fourteen, while in England one in six has a vote; but the reduction was accompanied with scrutin de liste and the ballot, and it was felt that something could now be done. Accordingly a new Socialist Labour Party was formed on the usual Marxist lines, under the leadership of a very capable man, an orator and a good organizer, Andrea Costa, who was formerly an anarchist. This party obtained 50,000 votes at the first subsequent election, and returned two candidates to the Legislature, one of them being Costa. In 1883 it formed a working alliance with the Italian Democratic Society—an active working-class body of which Costa was a leading member; and in 1884 it entered into an incorporating union with another working-class body, the Lombardy Labour Federation, which had a large number of local branches. With their help it had become, in 1886, an organization of 133 branches, and Government resolved to suppress it. Most of the branches in the north of Italy were dissolved, and their funds, flags, and libraries confiscated. But the party is still active over the country. They returned three members at the late election in November, 1890. The growth of this party was even more displeasing to the anarchists than to the Government, and in 1882 they called back Maletesta, one of their old leaders, from abroad, to conduct a regular campaign over the whole kingdom against Costa, and to denounce every man for a traitor to the socialist cause who should take any manner of part in parliamentary elections, or show the smallest sign of reconciliation to the existing order of things. His campaign ended in his arrest in May, 1883, and the condemnation of himself and 53 comrades to several years' imprisonment for inciting to disturbance of the public peace. Besides their contentions with the Socialist Labour Party, the Italian anarchists are much given to contending among themselves, and split up, even beyond other parties of the kind, upon trifles of doctrine or procedure. But however divided they may be, socialists and anarchists in Italy are all united in opposing the new social legislation of the Government. When the Employers' Liability Bill was introduced, Costa declared that legislation of that kind was utterly useless so long as the people were denied electoral rights, because till the franchise was reduced far enough to give the people a real voice in public affairs, there could be no security for the loyal and faithful execution of the provisions of such an act.

The Italian socialists and anarchists have always had a lively brood of journals, which, however, are generally shorter lived than even socialist organs elsewhere; but when one dies for want of funds to-day, another comes out in its place to-morrow. This remarkable fertility in journals seems to be due to the large literary proletariat that exists in Italy—the unemployed educated class who could live by their pen if they only had a paper to use it in. Through their presence among the socialists new journals are pushed forward without sufficient funds to carry them on, and as the people are too poor to subscribe to them, and the party too poor to subsidize them, they soon come to a natural termination.

The development of socialism in Italy is no matter of surprise. Though there is no great industry in the country, the whole population seems a proletariat. There is a distressed nobility, a distressed peasantry, a distressed working class, a distressed body of university men. Mr. Gallenga says that for six months of the year Italy is a national workshop; everybody is out of employment, and has to get work from the State; and he states as the reason for this, that the employing class wants enterprise and ability, and are apt to look to the Government for any profitable undertakings. The Government, however, are no better financiers than the rest, and the state of the public finances is one of the chief evils of the country. Taxation is very heavy, and yet property and life are not secure. "The peasants," says M. de Laveleye, "are reduced to extreme misery by rent and taxation, both alike excessive. Wages are completely inadequate. Agricultural labourers live huddled in bourgades, and obtain only intermittent employment. There is thus a rural proletariat more wretched than the industrial. Excluded from property by latifundia, it becomes the enemy of a social order that crushes it." The situation is scarcely better in parts of the country which are free from latifundia. In Sicily most of the agricultural population live on farms owned by themselves; but then these farms are too small to support them adequately, and their occupiers scorn the idea of working for hire. There are as many nobles in Sicily as in England, and Mr. Dawes (from whose report on Sicily to the Foreign Office in 1872 I draw these particulars states) that 25 per cent. of the lower orders are what he terms drones—idlers who are maintained by their wives and children. In Italy there is little working-class opinion distinct from the agricultural. There are few factories, and the artisans who work in towns have the habit of living in their native villages near by, and going and coming every day to their work. Two-thirds of the persons engaged in manufactures do so, or at least go to their rural homes from Saturday till Monday. Their habits and ways of thinking are those of agriculturists, and the social question of Italy is substantially the agricultural labourers' question. The students at the universities, too, are everywhere leavened with socialism. The advanced men among them seem to have ceased to cry for a republic, and to place their hope now in socialism. They have no desire to overturn a king who is as patriotic as the best president, and they count the form of government of minor importance as compared with the reconstitution of property. Bakunin thought Italy the most revolutionary country of Europe except Spain, because of its exceptionally numerous body of enthusiastic young men without career or prospects; and certainly revolutionary elements abound in the peninsula, but, as M. de Laveleye shrewdly remarks, a revolution is perhaps next to impossible for want of a revolutionary metropolis. "The malaria," he says, "which makes Rome uninhabitable for part of the year will long preserve her from the danger of becoming the seat of a new commune."

In Spain, as in Italy, socialism made its first appearance in 1868 through the agency of the International, and found an immediate and warm response among the people. In 1873 the International had an extensive Spanish organization with 300,000 members and 674 branches planted over the whole length and breadth of the country, from industrial centres like Barcelona to remote rural districts like the island of Majorca. M. de Laveleye was present at several sittings of these socialist clubs when he visited Spain in 1869, and he says: "They were usually held in churches erected for worship. From the pulpit the orators attacked all that had previously been exalted there—God, religion, the priests, the rich. The speeches were white hot, but the audience remained calm. Many women were seated on the ground, working, nursing their babes, and listening attentively as to a sermon. It was the very image of '93." He adds that their journals wrote with unparalleled violence, especially against religion and the Church.

On the division of the International in 1872 the Spanish members sided with Bakunin, supporting the anarchist view of the government of the future. This was natural for Spaniards, among whom their own central government had been long thoroughly detested, and their own communal organization regarded with general satisfaction. The Spanish people, even the humblest of them, are imbued beyond others with those sentiments of personal dignity and mutual equality which are at the bottom of democratic aspirations; and in their local communes, where every inhabitant who can read and write has a voice in public council, they have for ages been accustomed to manage their own affairs with harmony and advantage. The revolutionary tradition of Spain has accordingly always favoured communal autonomy, and the Federal rather than the Central Republic. Castelar declares the Federal Republic to be the most perfect form of State, though he thinks it for the present impracticable; and the revolution of 1873, in which the International played an active part, was excited for the purpose of establishing it. The Federal Republicans are not all socialists. Many of them are for making the agricultural labourers peasant proprietors, and even for dividing the communal property among them; but in a country like Spain, where communal property exists already to a large extent, the idea of making all other property communal property lies ever at hand as a ready resource of reformers. Nor, again, are all Spanish socialists federalists. There is a Social Democratic Labour party in Spain which broke off from the anarchists in 1882, and published a programme more on Marxist lines, demanding (1) the acquisition of political power; (2) the transformation of all private and corporate into the common property of the nation; and (3) the reorganization of society on the basis of industrial associations. This body is not very numerous, but at one of its recent congresses it had delegates from 152 different branches, and it has for the last four years had a party organ, El Socialista, in Madrid.

The bulk of Spanish socialism still belongs, however, to the anarchist wing. Little has been heard of the anarchists in Spain since the revolution of 1873 and the fall of the International. They have usually been blamed for the attempts on the life of the king in 1878, but they have certainly never resorted to those promiscuous outrages which have formed so much of the recent policy of the anarchists of other countries; and except for participation in a few demonstrations of the unemployed, they have maintained a surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive existence. In 1881 they reconstituted themselves as the Spanish Federation of the International Working Men's Association, which is said by the author of "Socialismus und Anarchismus, 1883-86," apparently on their own authority, to have 70,000 members in all Spain, who are distributed in 800 branches, and hold regular district and national congresses, but always under cover of secrecy. They have two journals in Madrid, and others in the larger towns elsewhere. They are sorely divided into parties and schools on very petty points, and fierce strife rages between the tweedledums and tweedledees. One party has broken away altogether and established a society of its own, under the name of the Autonomists. The anarchists are in close alliance with an agrarian organization called the Rural Labourers' Union, which has agitated since 1879 for the abolition of latifundia in Andalusia, but they always disclaim all connection with the more notorious Andalusian society, the Black Hand, which committed so many outrages in 1881 and 1882, and is often identified with the anarchists. The Black Hand is a separate organization from the anarchists, and has, it is said, 40,000 members, mostly peasants, in Andalusia and the neighbouring provinces; but their principles are undoubtedly socialistic. Their views are confined to the subject of land; but they declare that land, like all other property, has been made by labour, that it therefore cannot in right belong to the idle and rich class who at present own it, and that any means may be legitimately employed to deprive this class of usurpers of their possessions—the sword, fire, slander, perjury.

In Spain, unlike most other countries, the artisans of the towns show less inclination to socialistic views than the rural labourers. They have an active and even powerful labour movement of their own, carried on through an extensive organization of trade unions which has risen up rapidly within the last few years, especially in Catalonia, and they put their whole trust in combination, co-operation, and peaceful agitation for gradual reform under the present order of things, and will have nothing to say to socialism or anarchism; so much so, that they manifested the greatest reluctance to join in the eight hour demonstrations of May-day, 1890, because they did not wish to be confounded or in any way identified with the more extreme faction who were getting those demonstrations up; and they actually held a rival demonstration of their own on Sunday, the 4th of May, "in favour," as they stated in the public announcement of it, "of State socialism and of State legislation, both domestic and international, to improve the general condition of the working classes without any revolutionary or sudden change that could alarm the Sovereign and the governing classes."

Spain made a beginning in factory legislation in 1873, when an act was passed restricting the labour of children and young people; but the act remained dead-letter till 1884, when the renewal of agitation on the social question by the various parties led the cabinet to issue an order to have this law carried into effect, and a little later in the same year to appoint a royal commission to institute a thorough inquiry into the whole circumstances of the labouring classes, and the conditions of their improvement. This commission, which received nothing but abuse from the anarchists, who said the labour problem must be settled from below and not from above, was welcomed very heartily by the trade unionists, and with favour rather than otherwise even by the Social Democrats; but it has as yet had little or no result, and men who know the country express their opinion very freely that it will never lead to anything but an act or two that will remain dead-letter like their predecessors. The suffrage is high, only one person in seventeen having a vote; and working-class legislation will continue lukewarm till the working class acquires more real political power. A leading Spanish statesman said lately: "The day for social questions has not yet come in Spain, and we can afford to look on and see other countries make experiments which may be of use some day when our politicians and thinkers can find time to devote attention to these twentieth century problems."

There seems much truth in the view that socialism, spite of the alarm its spread caused to the Spanish Government in 1872, is really a disease of a more advanced stage of industrial development than yet exists in Spain, and therefore unlikely to grow immediately into anything very formidable there. The country has few large industrial centres. Two-thirds of the people are still engaged in agriculture; and though it is among the agricultural classes socialism has broken out, the outbreak has been local, and confined to provinces where the conditions of agricultural labour are decidedly bad. But these conditions vary much from province to province. In the southern provinces the cereal plains and also the lower pasturages are generally possessed by large proprietors, who work them by farmers on the metayer principle, with the help of bands of migratory labourers in harvest time; but in the mountainous parts of these provinces the estates belong for the most part to the communes. They are usually large, and as every member of the commune has an undivided right of using them, he is able to obtain from them the main part of his living without rent. Many of the inhabitants of such districts engage in the carrying trade, to which they conjoin a little cattle-dealing as opportunities offer; and as they are sober and industrious, they are usually comparatively well off. In the northern provinces the situation is in some respects better. Land is much subdivided, and though the condition of the labouring class is not as a rule unembarrassed, that result is due more to their own improvidence and indolence than to anything else. A man of frugal and industrious habits can always rise without much difficulty from the position of day labourer to that of metayer tenant, and from tenancy to proprietorship, and some of the small proprietors are able to amass a considerable competency. Besides, even the improvident are saved from the worst by the communal organization. They have always a right of pasturage on the commons, and a right to wood for fire, house and furniture, and they get their children's education and medical attendance in sickness gratuitously on condition of giving six days' labour at the roads of the commune. The most active and saving part of the population, north and south, is the class of migratory workmen, who stay at home only during seed-time and harvest, and go for the rest of the year to work in Castile, Andalusia, or Portugal, as masons or carpenters, or waiters, and always come back with a store of money. Sometimes they remain abroad for a year or two, and sometimes they go to Cuba or Mexico for twenty years, and return to settle on a property of their own in their native village. This class forms the personnel of the small property in Spain, and they give by their presence a healthy stimulus to the neighbourhoods they reside in. The small property is in Spain, as elsewhere, too often turned from a blessing to a curse by its subdivision, on the death of the proprietor, among the members of his family, who in Spain are usually numerous, though it is interesting to learn that in some of the Pyrenean valleys it has been preserved for five hundred years by the habit of integral transmission to the eldest child—son or daughter—coupled with the habit of voluntary celibacy on the part of many of the other children. The economic situation of Spain, then, is not free from defects; but there always exists a wide margin of hope in a country where, as Frere said, "God Almighty has so much of the land in His own holding," and its economic situation would not of itself be likely to precipitate social revolution.

From Spain, socialism passed into Portugal; but from the first it has worked very quietly there. Its adherents formed themselves into an association in 1872, and held congresses, published newspapers, started candidates, and actively promoted their views in every legitimate way. Their programme was anarchism, like that of their Spanish allies; but, unlike anarchists elsewhere, they repudiated all resort to violence, for, as M. de Laveleye says, they are naturally "less violent than the Spaniards, the economic situation of the country is better, and liberty being very great, prevents the explosion of popular fury, which is worse when exasperated by repression." Portugal is an agricultural country in a good climate, where the people have few wants, and find it easy to satisfy them fairly well. In the absence of any manner of acute discontent, socialism could never have been much better than an abstract speculation; and Portuguese socialism, if we may trust the complaints made by the party elsewhere, seems now to have lost even the savour it had. In March, 1888, one of the socialist newspapers of London reported that the Portuguese working men's movement had, in the course of the preceding ten years, given up the straightforward socialist character it once had; that its leaders had entered into compromises with other political parties, and threw themselves too much into experiments in co-operation; that the party press was very lukewarm in its socialism, and inclined more to mere Radicalism; and that one or two attempts that had been made to start more extreme journals had completely failed; but it announced with satisfaction, that at last, in January, 1888, a frankly anarchist paper was published at Oporto—A Revoluzao Social. About the same time the editor of a journal which had made some hostile remarks on anarchism was shot, and anarchists were blamed and arrested for the deed. There was a Socialist Congress at Lisbon in 1882, composed of twelve delegates representing eight societies, all in Lisbon or Oporto.

While the socialist cause has been thus rather retreating in the south of Europe, it has been making some advances in the north. Of the three Scandinavian countries, Denmark alone gave any early response to the socialist agitation; but there are now socialist organizations in Sweden and Norway, and the movement in Denmark has assumed considerable dimensions. Attempts were made to introduce socialism into Norway as far back as 1873 by Danish emissaries, and the International also founded a small society of thirty-seven members in Christiania; but the society seems to have died, and nothing more was heard of socialism there till the commotion in favour of a Republic in 1883. A Social Democratic Club was then established in Christiania, and a Social Democratic Congress was held at Arendal in 1887; but even yet Norwegian social democracy is of so mild a character that it would be counted conservatism by Social Democrats elsewhere, for this Congress issued a programme for a new labour party without a word of socialism in it, and merely asking for a normal working day, for factory legislation and reform of taxation. In Sweden there is more appearance of agitation, because there is one very active agitator in the country, Palm, a tailor, who keeps socialism en evidence by making stump speeches, or getting up street processions with the usual red flags, and sometimes—such was the easy indifference of the Government to his work at first—with a military band in full uniform at the head of them. The Swedish socialists had four newspapers in 1888, but three of them were confiscated by the Government in December of that year, and their editors arrested for offences against religion and the throne. In May, 1890, they held their first Congress at Stockholm, when delegates appeared from twenty-nine unions; but the movement is very unimportant in Sweden and Norway, and the chief conditions of success seem wanting to it in those countries. There is no class of labourers there without property; no town residuum, and no rural cottagers. There being few great manufacturers in the kingdom, only fifteen per cent. of the people altogether live in towns. The rest are spread sparsely over the rural districts on farms belonging to themselves, and in the absence of roads are obliged to make at home many of the ordinary articles of consumption. What with the produce of their small properties and their own general handiness, they are unusually independent and comfortable. M. de Laveleye considers them the happiest people in Europe.

The circumstances of Denmark are different. The operatives of the town are badly off. Mr. Strachey tells us in his report to the Foreign Office in 1870 that every fourth inhabitant of Copenhagen was in receipt of parochial relief in 1867, and he says that while the Danish operatives are sober, and well educated, they fail in industry and thrift. "No fact in my report," he states, "is more certain than that the Dane has yet to learn the meaning of the word work; of entireness and thoroughness he has seldom any adequate notion. This is why the Swedish artisan can so often take the bread from his mouth." In the rural districts, too, the economic situation, though in some respects highly favourable, is attended by a shadow. The land is, indeed, widely diffused. There are in all 280,000 families in the rural districts of Denmark, and of these 170,000 occupy independent freeholds, 30,000 farm hired land, and only 26,000 are agricultural labourers pure and simple. Seven-eighths of the whole country is held by peasant proprietors, and as a rule no class in Europe has improved more during the last half century than the Danish peasant or Bonde. Mr. Strachey says: "The Danish landlord was till recent times the scourge of the peasantry. Under his paternal care the Danish Bonde was a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water; his lot was no better than that of the most miserable ryot of Bengal. The Bonde is now the freest, the most politically wise, the best educated of European yeomen." But there is another side to the picture. In Denmark, as in other places where the small property abounds, the property is often too small for the proprietor's necessities, and there thus arises a kind of proprietor-proletariat, unwilling to part with their land and unable to extract a living out of it. This class, along with the rural labourers who have no property, constitute a sort of fourth estate in the country, and there as elsewhere their condition is preparing a serious social question for the future. Then, among the influences favourable to the acceptance of socialism in Denmark, must be counted the fact that one of the two great political parties of the country is democratic. Curiously enough that party consists of the peasantry, and the Conservatives of Denmark are the commercial classes of the towns, with the artisans in their wake, their Conservatism, however, being substantially identical with the Liberalism of the same classes in other countries. This democratic party seeks to make everything in the State conduce to the interests of the peasantry, and keeps alive in the country the idea that the State exists by the will of the people, and for their good alone.

The International was introduced into this exclusively Protestant country by two militant Roman Catholics—Pio, a retired military officer, who came to Denmark as religious tutor to a baroness who had joined the Church of Rome, and Geleff, who wrote for an Ultramontane journal. They pursued their new mission with great zeal and success. They opened branches of the association in most of the towns, started a party newspaper, held open-air meetings, were sent to imprisonment for sedition in 1873, and on their release in 1877 absconded to America with the whole of the party funds, and disputed bitterly there over the spoil. While they were in prison, the International was suppressed in Denmark; but the members merely reconstituted the organization under the name of the Socialist Labour Party, and the place of leader was taken for a time by an authoress, Jacquette Lilyenkrantz, for, as in other countries, women are in Denmark among the most active propagandists of socialism. They kept up communications with the socialist leaders in Germany, and the meeting of the German Socialist Congress at Copenhagen in 1883 gave the movement a new impetus. They were able to return two deputies, Holm and Hördun, to the Volkething in 1884, and they took part, 80,000 strong, in the Copenhagen procession of 1886, in commemoration of the fundamental law of the State. Their chief party organ, the Social Demokraten, has a circulation of 26,000 daily, one of the largest newspaper circulations in Denmark; and there are other four socialist journals in the kingdom.

They belong to the moderate wing of social democracy, being opposed to revolution and terrorism, and placing their confidence in constitutional agitation. Their programme is substantially that of Gotha—the right of the labourers to the full product of labour, State management of all industry, free education, universal suffrage, normal working day, abolition of class inequalities, single chamber in legislature, free justice, no standing army, State provision for sick and aged, religions to be a private affair. They turn their propaganda with most hope to the land proletariat; and a recent writer, P. Schmidt, in an interesting paper in the Arbeiterfreund for 1889, says they are succeeding in their mission, and that socialism is spreading more and more every day among the rural labourers. At their last Congress, held at Copenhagen, in June, 1890, and attended by seventy-one delegates from fifty-four different branches, their attention was chiefly occupied with questions about the land; provision of more land for the people by compulsory acquisition of ecclesiastical property and uncultivated ground; State advances of capital to agricultural labourers; agricultural schools; better housing for farm servants, etc. In 1887 they held a socialist exhibition in Copenhagen—an international exhibition of socialist pamphlets, newspapers, books, magazines, and pictures; and in 1890 they returned two members to the Landthing—the first time they secured representatives in the Upper Chamber.

Belgium has many of the conditions of soil most favourable for socialism—a dense population, large towns, an advanced productive system, and an industrial class at once very numerous, very ill paid, and very open, through their education, to new social ideas. For a time, accordingly, socialism spread remarkably in that country. The International had eight federations of branches in 1869, with 60,000 members and several newspapers. In the dispute between Marx and Bakunin, the Belgian Internationalists seem to have sided as a body with Bakunin; but they presently fell out among themselves, and, in spite of many repeated efforts at reconciliation, they have never since succeeded in composing their differences. The German socialist leaders tried to reorganize them in 1879 at a special Congress at Brussels, under the name of the Socialist Labour Party of Belgium, and with the Gotha programme; but they were rent again in 1881 by a division which had then entered into German socialism itself. The majority of the party adhered to Liebknecht and Bebel; but an active minority, composed chiefly of Walloons, followed the anarchist views of Most and Hasselman, withdrew from the party, and founded another called the Revolutionary Union. The anarchists have one journal—Ni Dieu, Ni Maître—violent, as the name indicates, but obscure and unimportant; but they believe most in the less intellectual propaganda of deed, and make themselves conspicuous from time to time by dynamite explosions and street fights with the police or the military, or their own socialist rivals. The Belgian socialists, on the other hand, look more to constitutional and parliamentary action, and usually work with the Liberals at the elections; but the Belgian voting qualification is high, and they have never succeeded in returning a candidate of their own. In 1887 their candidate for Brussels got 1,000 votes, while his successful rival had 3,000. They took an active part in the Republican agitation which was raised by the School Law in 1884. They have capable leaders, and they publish two journals, which, however, for want of funds, appear only at distant and uncertain intervals. They have lately begun to hold many open-air meetings, which the authorities had long forbidden, and they held an International Socialist Exhibition at Ghent in 1887 like that held in the same year at Copenhagen.

On the whole socialism, after twenty years' work, is making no way in Belgium, notwithstanding the favourable character of the soil, because the labour movement is choosing other directions and forms of organization. Trade unions and co-operative societies have been multiplying much during these twenty years, and in 1885 a strong Belgian Labour Party was formed, with 120 branches and 100,000 members, which aims at promoting the practical wellbeing of the working class by remedial legislation—by in some cases vicious State-socialistic legislation, it may be—but has no word of the right to the full product of labour, of the nationalization of all industry, or of the social revolution. One of the items of the programme is worded "collective property"; but whether it contemplates the universal State-property of collectivism or the corporate property of co-operation does not appear. The other items are universal suffrage, direct legislation by the people (presumably the referendum), free undenominational education, abolition of standing army, abolition of budget of worship, normal work day, normal wages, regulation of work of women and children, factory inspection, employers' liability, workmen's chambers, courts of conciliation, repeal of taxes on means of subsistence, increased income tax, international labour legislation. M. de Laveleye attributes the ill success of socialism in Belgium, and no doubt rightly, to the influence of discussion and free institutions. Government has left it to stand or fall on its own merits before public opinion. The socialists enjoy full liberty of the platform and press; they can hold meetings and congresses and form clubs in any town they please, and the result is that though the movement, like all new movements, made a certain impression and advance for a time at first, it got checked under the influence of discussion and the application of solid practical judgment. Then, though the Belgian Legislature has not yet done what it can and ought for ameliorating the condition of the labourers, philanthropy has been very active and useful in a number of ways in that kingdom. The Catholic Church has always intervened to keep up a high ideal of employers' responsibility—the old ideal of a patriarchal care; and there is a strong organization in Belgium of Catholic Working Men's Clubs, which were formed into one body in 1867, which were united with the Catholic Working Men's Clubs of Germany in 1869, and with those of France in 1870, and which now constitute with these the International Catholic Working Men's Association.

It ought perhaps to be mentioned that there is an old but small party of Land Nationalizers in Belgium, the Colinsian Socialists, whose principles have been warmly endorsed by Mr. Ruskin as "forming the most complete system of social and political reform yet put forward." They want the State to own all the soil, and let it out by auction; but they are opposed to nationalizing any of the other instruments of production.

In Holland, wealth is very unequally divided, wages are low, and taxation, being largely indirect, falls heavily on the working class; but the people are phlegmatic, domestic, religious, and contrive on small means to maintain a general appearance of comfort and decency. Above all, they enjoy free institutions; and, under freedom, socialism has run the same course in Holland as in Belgium. The International made rapid advances in 1869, founded branches in all the towns, and carried on, after the Paris Commune, so active and successful an agitation that the bourgeoisie took alarm, and Government imposed some restrictions on the disaffected press. But a general rise in wages happened about the time, a strong co-operative movement was promoted under the lead of the orthodox divines, a lively polemic against socialism broke out among the working men themselves, and all interest in the social revolution seemed to have died away, when, in 1878, it was revived again by D. Niewenhuis, a retired Protestant minister, a man of capacity and zeal, who has been unwearied in his advocacy of the cause ever since. He started in that year a journal, Recht Voor Allen, which is still, I believe, the only socialist organ in Holland, and appears now three times a week; and he founded the Social Democratic Union in 1884, which is strongest in the Hague and Amsterdam, but has branches in most of the other towns, and a membership by no means inconsiderable, though much below the old numbers of the Dutch International. After being imprisoned in 1887 for political reasons, Niewenhuis was returned to the Legislature in 1888—the first socialist who has sat there. The Dutch Socialists, to increase their numbers, enrol a class of "secret" members, timid spirits who will only come to them "by night, for fear of the Jews." There is also a handful of anarchists in Holland, who have a newspaper in Amsterdam, and are said to live harmoniously with the socialists, and, according to the reports of the American consuls, nobody in the country thinks any harm of either.

Switzerland has swarmed for a century with conspirators of all hues and nations; but the Swiss—thanks again to free institutions—have been steel against revolution. The "Young Germanys" and "Young Italys" whom she sheltered in the past sought only, it is true, to win for their own countries the political freedom which Switzerland already enjoyed; but the socialist and anarchist refugees of the last twenty years have had social principles to preach which were as new and as good for the Swiss as for their own countrymen; and, speaking as they did the languages of the Confederation, they have never ceased making active efforts for the conversion of the Swiss. The old Jurassian Federation of the International, still continues to exist in French-speaking Switzerland, and to bear witness for the extremest kind of anarchist communism—no force or authority whatever, and a collective consumption of products as well as a collective production; but this body is not increasing, and though Guesde, the French socialist, made a lecturing tour through that division of Switzerland in 1885, he had quite as little success for his branch of the revolutionary cause. There are numbers of Social Democratic Clubs in the German-speaking cantons, but they consist mainly of German refugees, and contain few native Swiss members. After the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1879, the German socialists settled largely in Switzerland. They transferred to Zurich their party organ, the Social Democrat, and along with it, to use their own phrase, the entire Olympus of the party, the body of writers and managers who moved the shuttle of its operations. These propagandists naturally did not neglect the country of their adoption, but used every opportunity to forward their agitation by addresses and even by extended missionary journeys, and a separate Swiss Social Democratic party was actually founded, with a separate organ, the Arbeiterstimme; but it collapsed in 1884 from internal dissensions. No attempt was made to revive it till 1888, when the action of the Federal Council in May against the foreign socialists resident in the Confederation led to the organization of a Swiss socialist party in October. The Federal Government had already, in 1884 and 1885, taken measures against the political refugees, especially the anarchists, who were thought to have abused the hospitality they received by planning and preparing in Switzerland the series of crimes which shocked all Europe in 1884, and even by trying to explode the Federal Palace at Berne itself. The Government instituted an inquiry, and finding the country absolutely riddled with anarchist clubs, determined to keep the eye of the police on them, and in the meantime expelled thirty or forty of their leading members from Switzerland altogether. These were almost without exception either Austrians or Germans, and included Neve, now a leading anarchist in London. The Russian anarchists were apparently not thought so dangerous, their great occupation being to invent new ways and means of smuggling newspapers into Russia; but they disliked the police supervision to which they were subjected, and very generally quitted Switzerland of their own accord for London or Paris. The anarchist organ, the Revolté, was removed at the same time to Paris, but its place in Geneva was taken by a new paper—L'Egalitaire. In 1888 the police were ordered to report all socialist meetings held in the country, and all arrivals or departures of "foreigners whose means of subsistence was unknown, and whose presence might, for other reasons, become dangerous to the safety of the country"; and as this further turn of the screw was believed to be made on the instigation of Germany, it provoked considerable opposition, one result of which was the formation of the new Swiss socialist party.

This party, however, is not an affair of any magnitude, and does not appear very likely to become so; for the working men of Switzerland have the public power in their own hands already, and they have their own organizations besides to look after their interests; and while they are by no means averse to the use of the powers of the State, they are disposed to move with inquiry and caution, and to see every step of their way before running into speculative schemes of foreign origin. Their political position satisfies them, because they know they are too strong for Government to neglect their wishes, because some labour laws have already been passed for their protection, and because the authorities always show themselves ready to entertain any new proposals for the same object, as, for example, they did in May, 1890, by summoning an International Congress at Berne to discuss the length of the working day and other conditions of labour.

Their economic position, moreover, is also comparatively satisfactory for various reasons, among which Mr. Bonar, in his report to the Foreign Office in 1870, gives a chief place to the general working of democratic institutions and the prevalence of benevolent and charitable associations. "In enumerating," he says, "the favourable circumstances in which the Swiss working man is placed, prominence must be given to the immense extension of the principle of democracy, which, whatever, may be its defects and dangers from a political point of view when pushed to extremes, serves in Switzerland in its economical effects to advance the cause of the operative by removing the barriers dividing class from class, and to establish among all grades the bonds of mutual sympathy and goodwill, further strengthened by a widely-spread network of associations organized with the object of securing the common interests and welfare of the people." Masters and workmen are socially more equal than in most European countries; they sit side by side at the board of the Communal Council, they belong to the same choral societies, they refresh themselves at the same cafés. In most cantons, too, operatives are either owners of, or hold from the communes, small pieces of land which they cultivate in their leisure hours, and which thus serve them when work gets slack or fails altogether. The favourable rural economy of the country is well known; its peasant proprietors rival those of France. The Swiss societies of beneficence are remarkable, and almost suggest the hope that the voluntary socialism of a more enlarged and widely organized system of charity may be found to furnish a substantial solution of the social question. Every canton of Switzerland has its society of public utility, whose aims take an extensive range; it gives the start to projects of improvement of every description, infant schools, schools of design, savings banks, schemes for the poor, the sick, the dumb, singing classes, halls for Sunday recreation, popular lectures, workmen's houses, protection of animals, even industrial undertakings which promise to be ultimately beneficial, though they may not pay at first. The society of Basle has 900 members and a capital of £6,000, and the Swiss Society of Public Utility is an organization for the whole Republic, which holds an annual congress at Zurich, and general meetings in the different cantons by turns. These meetings pass off with every mark of enthusiasm, and gather together men of all religious and political opinions in a common concern for the progress and prosperity of the masses. One of the institutions which these societies have largely promoted is what they call a hall of industry, or a bazaar, where loans may be received by workmen on the security of their wages, or of goods they may deposit. A labourer who has made any article which he cannot get immediately sold, may deposit it at one of these bazaars, and obtain an advance equal to a fixed proportion of its value, and if the article is sold at the bazaar, the proceeds are accounted for to the depositor, less the sum advanced and a small charge for expenses. These institutions, Mr. Bonar says, have had excellent effects, though he admits that the facilities of borrowing have led the working men in some places into debt; but they are at any rate a vast improvement on the pawnbroking system in vogue elsewhere. The condition of Switzerland shows us clearly enough that democracy under a régime of freedom lends no ear to socialism, but sets its face in entirely different directions.

The United States of America have done more for experimental socialism than any other country. Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians have all established communities there, but these communities have failed long ago, except one of the Icarian, and the only other socialist experiments now existing in America are seventy or eighty religious communities, Shakers and Rappists, whose success has been due to their religious discipline and their celibacy, and whose members amount to no more than 5,000 souls all told. There is indeed a Russian Commune in California, but it remains a solitary Russian Commune still, the "new formula of civilization," as Russian reformers used to call it, showing no sign of further adoption. Nor has the new or political socialism found any better success in the States. There are various indigenous forms of it—such as the agrarian socialism of Mr. Henry George, and the nationalism of Mr. E. Bellamy—but in point of following they are of little importance, and the socialism of the American socialist and revolutionary parties is a mere German import, with as yet a purely German consumption. It has been pushed vigorously in the American market for twenty years, but taken singularly little hold of the American taste. There is one revolutionary socialist body composed chiefly of English-speaking members, the International Workmen's Association, which was founded in 1881 in one of the western states; but Mr. Ely says its membership would be generously estimated at 15,000, and it considers the great work of the present should be popular education, so as to prepare the people for the revolution when it comes.

The Boston Anarchists, perhaps, ought not, strictly speaking, to be included in any account of socialism, for, unlike most contemporary anarchists, they are not socialist, but extremely individualist; but historically, it is worth noting, Boston Anarchism is the doctrine of a disenchanted socialist, Josiah Warren, who had lived with Robert Owen at New Harmony, and came to the conclusion that that experiment failed because the individual had been too much sunk in the community, and no room was left for the play of individual interests, individual rights, and individual responsibilities. From Owen's communism, Warren ran to the opposite extreme, and thought it impossible to individualize things too much. He would abolish the State, and have the work of police and defence done by private enterprise, like any other service. He issued some books, tried to carry out his views by practical experiment, and, though they failed, he has still a small band of believing disciples at Boston, who publish a newspaper called Liberty, but have no organization and no importance.

Henry George and his followers, too, perhaps ought not in strictness to be classified among socialists. He would certainly repudiate such a classification himself, and the United Labour Party, which he founded in 1886 to promote his views by political action, expelled the socialists from membership in 1887. His actual practical proposal is nothing more than a narrow and illusory plan of taxation; but he puts it forward so expressly as the keystone of a new social system, as the remedy prescribed by economic science itself for the complete regeneration of society and the simultaneous removal of all existing social evils, that he is not improperly placed among Utopian socialists. Does he not promise us a new heaven and a new earth? And if he believes the State can call the new heaven and the new earth into being by a mere turn in the incidence of taxation, while most other contemporary socialists think the State must first pull down all that now is and reconstruct the whole on a new plan, is he, on account of this greater credulity of his, to be considered a more, and not rather a less, sober and rational speculator than they? He wants to abolish landlordism, while they want to abolish landlordism and all other capitalism besides; and his views may fairly be called partial or agrarian socialism. The United Labour Party was founded mainly to promote Mr. George's panacea of the single tax on such land values as arise from the growth of society apart from individual exertion; but it includes other articles in its programme—the municipalization of the supply of water, light, and heat; the nationalization of all money, note issue, post, telegraphs, railways, and savings banks; reduction of the hours of labour, prohibition of child labour, suppression of the competition of prison labour with honest labour; sanitary inspection of houses, factories, and mines; simplification of legal procedure; secret ballot; payment of election expenses. The United Labour Party is not strong. When Mr. George stood for the Mayoralty of New York, he had 68,000 votes to his opponent's 90,000; but he had on that occasion the assistance of the Socialistic Labour Party, who are said by Mr. Ely to number about 25,000 in New York, and who certainly constituted a very considerable element in the United Labour Party, for they were expelled at the Party Convention only by a vote of 94 to 54. On the other hand, Mr. Ely's estimate of the strength of the socialists is possibly too high, for they ran a candidate for the Mayoralty of New York themselves in 1888, a leading man of the party, one Jones, and he only secured 2,000 votes. However that may be, the United Labour Party was certainly much weakened by the loss of the socialists, and they were disabled entirely in the following year by a division on the question of Free Trade and the secession of Father McGlynn and the Protectionist members.

Nationalism is the name of a new movement, the fruit of the remarkable and very popular novel of Mr. Edward Bellamy, "Looking Backward," which may be said to be the latest description of Utopia as it now stands with all the most modern improvements. Mr. Bellamy would have all industry organized and conducted by the nation on the basis of a common obligation of work and a general guarantee of livelihood, all men to get exactly the same wages, and to do exactly the same quantity of work, due allowance being made for differences in severity, and the State to enlarge indefinitely its free public provision of the means of common enjoyment and culture. Mr. Bellamy's charming pictures of the new country naturally engendered a general wish to be there, and many little societies have been established to hasten the hour; but as the movement has not been more than a year in being, little account can yet be given of its success. The Nationalists have quite recently issued an organ, The New Nation, which announces its programme to be (1) the nationalization of post, telegraphs, telephone, railways and coal mines; (2) municipalization of gas and water supply, and the like; and (3) the equalization of educational opportunities as between rich and poor, and the promotion of all reforms tending towards humaner, more fraternal, and more equal conditions. Nationalism out of Utopia, therefore, means merely a little State-socialism.

The strongest socialist organizations in the United States are the Socialistic Labour Party, corresponding to the Social Democrats of Europe, and the International Working People's Association, corresponding to the anarchists; but both are composed almost exclusively of Germans. There are more Germans in the North American Republic than in any State of Germany except Prussia; and as many of them have fled from their own country for political reasons—to escape the conscription, or to escape prosecution for sedition—they bear no goodwill to the old system of government, and harbour revolutionary ideas almost from the nature of things. A socialist propaganda began among them so far back as 1848, when Weitling, of whom more will be said presently, published a socialist newspaper; and a Socialist Gymnastic Union was established in New York in 1850, which succeeded in forming a kind of federal alliance, apparently for socialistic purposes, with a number of other local German gymnastic societies throughout the States; but though these societies still exist, they seem to have dropped their socialism. It was taken up again, however, in 1869, by the International, which transferred its General Council to New York in 1872, held congresses from time to time in the country, and eventually, at the Newark Convention of 1877, adopted the name of the Socialistic Labour Party, with a programme formed after the Gotha lines. The numbers of the party were strengthened in the years immediately following by the arrival of German refugees, expelled from their own land by the Socialist Laws; but the new members brought with them elements of dissension which speedily came to a head after the arrival of the incendiary spirit, John Most, in 1882, and led, in 1883, to the entire separation of the Anarchists from the Social Democrats. The latter held a separate Congress at Baltimore in the latter year, attended by 16 delegates, representing 23 branches and 10,000 members, and it reported that altogether 38 branches adhered to them. The anarchists held a Congress at Pittsburg, and formed themselves into the International Working People's Association, with the following principles:—

"What we would achieve is therefore plainly and simply—

"1st. Destruction of the existing class rule by all means; i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action.

"2nd. Establishment of a free society based upon co-operative organization of production.

"3rd. Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organizations without commerce and profit-mongery.

"4th. Organization of education on a secular, scientific, and equal basis for both sexes.

"5th. Equal rights for all without distinction of sex or race.

"6th. Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between the autonomous (independent) communes and associations resting on a federalistic basis." (Ely's "Labour Movement in America," p. 231.)

They differ from the Socialistic Labour Party, as this programme shows, in their exclusive devotion to revolution, and their opposition to all central government.

The Socialistic Labour Party has several newspapers, the principal being the Sozialist and the Neu Yorker Volkszeitung of New York, and the Tageblatt of Philadelphia; and the anarchists have more, the best known being Most's notorious Freiheit. Mr. Ely mentions sixteen socialist newspapers and ten sympathizing with socialism, and says that the majority of these support the anarchist side. The anarchists, moreover, have one journal in English—the Alarm; the Socialistic Labour Party started one in 1883, but it died. With that exception the press of both parties is entirely German, and neither party seems to have done almost anything in the way of an English propaganda from the platform. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling state that before they made their lecturing tour on the subject through the States in 1886, the American public had never heard socialism preached to them in their own tongue; yet books like Mr. Gronlund's "Co-operative Commonwealth," giving a very effective exposition of socialism, had already appeared from the American press. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling say, moreover, they met with more hostility to their mission from the anarchists than from any other source in America. The American people, while firmly stamping out the dynamite policy of the anarchists, have naturally nothing to say against an academic propaganda of any system of doctrine.

The trend of the labour movement in America seems away from socialism. That movement is in many respects more powerful there than in any European country. There are some five hundred labour newspapers in the United States, and an immense number of trade organizations of all kinds. Political power, moreover, both in the States and in the Union, is in the hands of the working class; and that class has now very nearly the same grievances there as it has in Europe, and the same aspirations after a better order of things. But their tendencies are not nearer socialism, but further from it. They simply cannot understand people who tell them they have no power to work out their own salvation under the system that is, and that nothing can be done, as Marx assures them, until every capital in Europe is ready for a simultaneous revolution with New York and Chicago. The trade unions accordingly ignore socialism. The Knights of Labour expressly repudiate it, and in the course of a very long programme they hardly make a demand which has a taint even of State-socialism. This "Noble Order of the Knights of Labour" is a general association of working men to promote the cause of labour, partly by their own efforts and partly through the Government. By their own efforts they are to promote co-operation till, if possible, it supersedes the present wages system entirely; equality of wages for men and women for equal work; a general eight hours day through a general strike; and a system of arbitration in trade quarrels. From the Union Legislature they want merely a few general reforms, none bearing directly on the situation of labour, except the abolition of foreign contract labour. The others are, reform of the currency, nationalization of telegraphs and railways, and the institution of banking facilities of various kinds in connection with the Post Office. From the State Legislatures they ask the reservation of public lands to actual settlers, the simplification of the administration of justice, factory legislation, graduated income tax, and the following provisions for labour: weekly payment of wages in money, mechanic's lien on the product of his labour for his wages, compulsory arbitration in trade disputes, prohibition of labour of children under fifteen. In 1886 they were 702,884 strong, but they have declined sorely since then. Their great weapon was to be an extension of strikes and boycotting beyond what was possible to single trades; but it was found that this policy was double-edged, and caused more hurt to some sections of the working class than any good it could do to others; and people lost faith in the principle of such huge miscellaneous organizations. Dr. Aveling contends that the Knights of Labour, in spite of Mr. Powderly's disclaimer, are really, though it may be unconsciously, socialists, because they want to supersede the wages system, if they can, by establishing co-operative institutions without State aid; and this, he holds, "is pure and unadulterated socialism." Indeed! then where is the man who is not a pure and unadulterated socialist? and what need for any mission to the States to preach the socialist message to the Americans for the first time in their own tongue?

England was the country last reached by the present wave of revolutionary socialism, although the system has been largely conceived upon a study of English circumstances, and is claimed to be peculiarly adapted to them. England is alternately the hope and the despair of Continental socialists. Every requisite of revolution is there, and yet the people will not rise. The yeomanry are gone. The land has come into the hands of a few. Industry is carried on by great centralized capital. The large system of production has almost finished its work. The mass of the people is a proletariat; they are thronged in large towns; every tenth person is a pauper; and the great mansions of the rich cast an evil shadow into the crowded dens of the wretched. "The English," says Eugène Dupont, a leading member of the old International, "possess all the materials necessary for the social revolution; but they lack the generalizing spirit and the revolutionary passion." Any proletariat movement in which the English proletariat takes no part, said Karl Marx, is "no better than a storm in a glass of water"; yet, though Marx himself resided in England for most of his life, no organized attempt was made to gain over the English proletariat to socialism till 1883—the year he died. There was before that, indeed, a small English section in a foreign socialist club in Soho; and, after the fall of the Paris Commune, hopes were for a time entertained of starting a serious socialist movement in our larger towns; but these hopes proved so delusive that Karl Marx said more than once to Mr. Hyndman, as we are told by the latter, that he despaired "of any great movement in England, unless in response to some violent impetus from without." But in 1883 a socialist movement seemed to break out spontaneously in England, the air hummed for a season with a multifarious social agitation, and we soon had a fairly complete equipment of socialist organizations—social democratic, anarchist, dilettante—which have ever since kept up a busy movement with newspapers, lectures, debates, speeches, and demonstrations in the streets.

In 1883 the Democratic Federation, which had been established two years before to promote measures of Radical reform, including, among other things, the nationalization of the land, adopted the socialistic principles of Karl Marx, and changed its name to the Social Democratic Federation. Its programme is long, and includes, besides the nationalization of land and all means of production, direct legislation by the people, direct election of all functionaries by adult suffrage, gratuitous justice, gratuitous, compulsory, and equal education, abolition of standing armies, Home Rule for Ireland, an eight hours day, State erection of workmen's dwellings, to be let at bare cost, progressive income tax, proportional representation, abolition of House of Lords, separation of Church and State, etc. Its principal founders were Mr. William Morris, an artist, a great poet, and a manufacturer exceptionally excellent in his arrangements with his workpeople; Mr. H. M. Hyndman, a journalist of standing and ability; Mr. J. Stuart Glennie, and Mr. Belfort Bax, both authors of repute; Dr. Aveling, a popular lecturer on science, and son-in-law of Karl Marx; Miss Helen Taylor, step-daughter of John Stuart Mill; and the Rev. Stewart Headlam. In January, 1884, they started a weekly newspaper, Justice, and a monthly magazine, To-Day, both of which still appear, and began the active work of lecturing and founding branches. But before the year was out, the old enemy of socialists, the spirit of division, entered among them, and Mr. Morris, with Dr. Aveling and Mr. Bax, seceded and set up an independent organization called the Socialist League, with a separate weekly organ, The Commonweal. The difference seems to have arisen out of the common socialist trouble about the propriety of mixing in current politics. The same disruptive tendency has persisted in the two parts, and in the end of 1890, Mr. William Morris seceded from the Socialist League with his local following at Hammersmith.

Neither of these revolutionary bodies has a complete organization like those of continental countries. They have never held a Congress, either national or provincial. They consist of a central committee in London, and detached local groups in the provinces, and their membership is not accurately known, but it is not extensive. It is in both cases declining, and it has always been variable, young men joining for a year or two, and then leaving. Their chief success has been among the miners of the North of England, and they have returned three members to the School Board of Newcastle. There is one socialist member in Parliament, Mr. Cunningham Graham, but he has not been returned on socialist principles or by a socialist vote; and hitherto the party has failed to obtain any serious support at the elections. At the election of 1885, Mr. John Burns, socialist candidate for Nottingham, had only 598 votes out of a total poll of 11,064, and Mr. J. Williams, the socialist candidate for Hampstead, had only 27 out of a total of 4,722. Mr. Burns, however, has since been returned to the London County Council, and will not improbably succeed in being returned to Parliament at next election. He is a working engineer, but is much the strongest leader English socialism has produced, an orator of great power, an excellent organizer, and the head and representative of a new labour movement which is likely to play a considerable part in the immediate future, and which is certainly fermented with a good measure of socialistic leaven. The New Unionism, as this movement is sometimes called, represents mainly the opinion of the new trade unions of unskilled labour—dockers and others—which have sprung into existence recently, and it was strong enough at the Trade Union Congress in 1890 to carry the day against the old unionism of the skilled trades by a considerable majority in favour of the compulsory and universal eight hours day. But, as Mr. T. Burt, M.P., the miners' parliamentary representative, said in his speech to the Eighty Club two months afterwards, the New Unionism is, after all, only the young and inexperienced unionism, and must needs run now through the same kind of errors which the older trade unions have gone through before, but will, like the older unions, learn, by discussion and experiment, to keep within the lines of practicable and beneficial action. However that may be, for the moment, at any rate, the fortunes of English socialism seem to lie with Mr. John Burns and his labour movement, and not with the two socialist organizations which appear to have already reached their height, and to be now on the decline.

A well-informed German writer lately warned us that anarchism had brought its headquarters to London, that it was coming into relations with the English population through its clubs and newspapers, and he ventured to prophesy that we should certainly have soon an anarchist fire to extinguish on our own hearth much more serious than Germany or Austria has had to encounter. So far, however, there is little to support such a prophecy. There are four small anarchist clubs in London—three of them German clubs, which live at strife with one another, and the fourth a Russian or Polish club, whose members have few or no dealings with the Germans. The German anarchists publish two weekly newspapers in German, which it is their great business to smuggle into the Fatherland, and the Russian or Polish anarchists publish one in Yedish—the German-Hebrew patois of the Polish Jews—which is printed for the entertainment of the Polish tailors of the East End. Some of the principal anarchist leaders, it is true, live amongst us—for example, Prince Krapotkin and Victor Dave—and under their influence a group of English anarchists has grown up during the last few years; but this group has already, after the manner of modern revolutionists, split on a point of doctrine into two opposite camps, which,—if we may judge from their respective organs, The Anarchist and Freedom—expend a considerable share of their destructive energies upon one another. The English anarchists have no permanent organization of any kind, and the one group are for socialist anarchism, and the other for individualist anarchism. On the whole the conversion of the English by the anarchist refugees is not an idea worthy of serious consideration; a better and more likely result would be that they would themselves, like Alexander Herzen, the leading anarchist of the past generation, be converted in England to more rational ideas of politics. Our safety lies, however, not so much in the practical character of our people, as in their habits of free and open discussion. What is called practicality is no safeguard against delusive ideas outside one's own immediate field of activity, and there is perhaps no country, except the still more practical country of America, where more favour is shown than here to fanaticism of any kind, if there seems to be heart in it. Besides, when we hear it said, We have indeed an enormous proletariat, but they are too practical to think of insurrection, we ought to reflect that, to the miserable, the practical test of a scheme will not be, Shall we be any the better for the change? but Shall we be any the worse for it? But under free institutions grievances always come to be ventilated; ventilation leads to more or less remedial measures, and discontent is removed altogether, or, at any rate, appeased for the time; and although under free institutions ill-considered schemes which inflate that discontent with delusive hopes may raise for a season a boom of earnest discussion, the discussion eventually kills them. So it seems to be with the fortunes of revolutionary socialism in England to-day. It has been much discussed for six years, but the height of the tide has been reached already, and the movement is now apparently on the ebb.

Besides these manifestations of revolutionary socialism, we have various societies representing an amateur and appreciative interest in socialism. There is the Christian Socialist Society, a small body of less than 150 adherents, including many clergymen and other members of the learned professions. They must not be confounded with the Christian Socialists of forty years ago, Maurice, Kingsley, and their allies, for the survivors of this earlier movement, such as Judge Thomas Hughes, Mr. Vansittart Neale, and Mr. J. M. Ludlow, do not belong to the present Christian Socialist Society, and would repudiate its principles. They wanted to promote co-operation without State interference, and they take a leading part in the co-operative movement still; but the Christian Socialist Society of the present day is all for State interference, and the articles of its organ, the Christian Socialist, strongly support the doctrines of Karl Marx, and declare that "the command, 'Thou shalt not steal,' if impartially applied, must absolutely prohibit the capitalist, as such, from deriving any revenue whatever from the labourer's toil." But with all their will to believe with the Marxists, the latter are not sure of them, and the socialist organs, Justice and To-Day, twit them one day for not being Christians, and the next for not being socialists. They are not men of the same mark as the earlier body of English Christian socialists, Canon Shuttleworth and Mr. Stewart Headlam being the two best known of them. The Guild of St. Matthew, which is composed to some extent of the same personnel as the Christian Socialist Society, has published a compendium of Christian socialism, and strives, among other branches of its activity, to cultivate good relations between socialists and the Church.

The Fabian Society, again, is a debating club of mixed socialism. It contains socialists of all feathers—revolutionary socialists and philosophical socialists, Christian socialists and un-Christian socialists—who meet together under its auspices and exchange their views, without having any recognised end beyond the discussion. They intervened lately, however, in the eight hours day controversy, and drafted a bill for a compulsory measure on the subject which attracted some public attention. Among the principal members are Mr. Sidney Webb, a well-known writer and lecturer on economic subjects, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, journalist, Mrs. Besant, and Mr. W. Clarke. They have published a volume of Fabian Essays, which has had a large sale.

No account of English socialism would be complete that made no mention of the writings of Mr. Ruskin, which have probably done more than any other single influence to imbue English minds with sentiments and principles of a socialistic character. But they have produced nothing in the nature of a school or party more than perhaps some detached local group; such, for example, as the Sheffield Socialists, a small body formed under Ruskinian inspiration, and the leadership of Mr. E. Carpenter.

The outburst of socialist agitation in England in 1883 and 1884 was immediately preceded by a revival of popular interest in an old and favourite subject of English speculation, the nationalization of the land. Mr. Henry George had published his "Progress and Poverty" in 1881, and in the same year the Democratic Federation was established in London with land nationalization for one of its principles, and Mr. A. R. Wallace, the eminent naturalist, founded the Land Nationalization Society. In 1882, Mr. Wallace contributed still further to awaken discussion of the question by publishing his work on "Land Nationalization," and the discussion was spread everywhere in 1883 by the appearance of a sixpenny edition of Mr. George's remarkable work. Land nationalization in the hands of Mr. Wallace has little in common with any form of contemporary socialism. He does not contemplate any interference with the present system of agricultural production; that is still to be conducted by capitalists and hired labourers, as it is now. He merely proposes to abolish what is called landlordism by the compulsory conversion of the present tenant farmers into a body of yeomanry or occupying owners, and his scheme differs from the more ordinary proposals for the creation of peasant proprietors merely in two points: 1st—which is a very good proposal—that he would leave part of the price of the property to be paid in the form of a permanent annual quitrent to the State; and 2nd—which is a more doubtful proposal—that this part should represent, as nearly as it is possible now to calculate it, the original value of the soil apart from improvements of any kind—or, in other words, the unearned part of the present value of the property—and that it should be subject to periodical revision, with a view to recovering from the holder any further unearned increments of value that may accrue to his holding from time to time. Mr. Wallace, like Mr. George, has very utopian expectations from his scheme; but he would honestly buy up the rights of the existing landlords, while Mr. George would merely confiscate them by exceptional taxation. This difference broke up the Land Nationalization Society in 1883, and the partisans of Mr. George's view seceded and formed themselves into the English Land Restoration League, which has established branches in most of the larger towns, and has now probably a more numerous membership than the original society. It is especially strong in Scotland, and ran three candidates for Glasgow at the last general election; but the three only got 2,222 votes between them, out of a total of 23,800 polled in the three divisions they contested. The ideas of the League have a certain vogue among the Highland crofters, where they blend very readily with the universal peasant doctrines that the earth is the Lord's, and that all other lords should be abolished.

In Scotland there are a good many branches of the two regular socialist organizations. The Scottish Emancipation League joined the Social Democratic Federation, and the Scottish Land and Labour League joined the Socialist League; but it is remarkable that there is no socialism in Ireland, except in a small branch of the Socialist League in Dublin, called the Dublin Socialist Club, although it seems a miracle for a country seething for centuries with political and economic discontent to escape such a visitation. Probably, as with the Poles, the minds of the discontented are already too much pre-occupied with other political and social solutions. The land nationalization views of Mr. George are, of course, spread widely through the influence of Mr. Michael Davitt in the agrarian movement of Ireland.

But while the recent wave of socialism has passed over discontented Ireland, and left it, like Gideon's fleece, quite dry, much more susceptibility has been shown by those parts of the Empire where the lot of labour is, perhaps in all the world, the happiest—the Australian colonies. Here, too, the susceptibility has been created to some extent by the land questions of the country. Mr. George, in his recent lecturing tour through these colonies, met with a warm welcome in almost all the towns he visited, made many converts to his ideas, and gave rise to a considerable agitation. In South Australia three of his disciples were returned to the Legislature in 1887, and their views are supported by several newspapers in Adelaide. In a new colony the argument for keeping the land in the hands of the State has in some respects more point and force than in an old. Mr. George's disciples in Sydney publish a paper called the Land Nationalizer, and his views are advocated by one of the most influential papers in the colony, the Bulletin of Sydney. In New Zealand a bill has actually been brought in for the purpose of nationalizing the land. But apart from Mr. George altogether, there is a flourishing Australian Socialist League in Sydney, established in 1887, and with a membership of 7,000 in 1888. It has a journal called the Radical, and keeps up a busy agitation with lectures and discussions. As a method of temporary policy it promotes associations of labourers for the purpose of undertaking Government and municipal contracts. In Melbourne, again, people are more advanced. They have no socialist organization, but they have an anarchist club, established in 1886 for the purpose of aiding social reform on the lines of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It circulates the works of Proudhon, Tucker, the Boston anarchist, Bakunin, and Mr. Auberon Herbert; and it publishes a newspaper called Honesty, which appeared at first once a month, and latterly once in two months. The ideas of the party are not easy to ascertain exactly from the pages of their journal. The State is, of course, the enemy, and land monopoly is one of the State's worst creations; but some of the writers advocate land nationalization, while others propound a scheme of what they call "constructive anarchy," under which every man is to own the land he occupies. They have started a new form of co-operative store, a kind of mutual production society, whose members bind themselves to produce for one another, and exchange their products for the bare cost of production; and they have started a co-operative home, in which the members get better and cheaper accommodation through their combination. Melbourne anarchism, however, has no harm in it: it is a mere spark of eccentric speculation. The working class of Melbourne is probably the most powerful and the best organized working class in the world. In their Trades Hall they have had for thirty years a workmen's chamber of their own creating like what German socialists are vainly asking from the State, and much more effective, because more independent. They have secured the eight hours day to fifty-two different trades without receiving a finger's help from the law, and without losing a shilling of wages. They have, moreover, the voting power in their own hands. In fact, they are, as nearly as any working class can be, in the precise condition socialists require for revolutionary action. They are entirely dependent on a handful of capitalists for their employment, and they have the whole power of the State substantially under their own control; so that they might, if they chose, march to the Parliament House with a red flag, and instal the socialist State to-morrow. But they do not choose. They propose no change in the present industrial system, and make surprisingly few demands of any sort upon the State. The world goes very well with them as it is, and they will not risk the comforts they really enjoy to try any sweeping and problematical solutions. While the socialist movement, in the countries where it is most advanced and powerful, seems settling into a practical labour movement, the labour movement, in the countries where it is most advanced and powerful, is steering furthest and clearest from socialism.