Socialism and Democracy in Europe Part 20

[32] This controversy is known as the "revisionist movement." The revisionists' position is set forth in Bernstein's book, _Die Voraussetzung des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozial-Demokratie_.

The Marxian position is set forth in Kautsky's reply, _Bernstein und die Sozial-Demokratie_. An English edition of Bernstein's book has been published in the Labor Party series in London.

[33] _Protokoll_, 1899.

[34] _Supra cit._, p. 94.

[35] _Supra cit._, p. 127.

[36] _Protokoll_, 1903, pp. 321-45.

[37] In the congress of 1907 Bebel tried to dispel the gloom by a long and optimistic speech in which he declared that their success was not to be measured by the number of seats they won, but by the number of voters. He closed by saying, "We are the coming ones, ours is the future in spite of all things and everything."--_Protokoll_, 1907, p.

323.

[38] One of the veteran party leaders answered my question as to the present-day influence of Marx as follows: "The bulk of our party have never read Marx. It takes a well-trained mind to understand him.

Conditions have entirely changed since his day, and we are busy with questions of which Marx never dreamed and of which he could not foretell. He laid the philosophical basis for our party, but our party is practical, not philosophical."

[39] In 1900 Bebel proposed the necessity of a working coalition with other parties in Prussia to gain electoral reform. He said: "We cannot stand alone. We must attempt to go hand in hand with certain elements in the bourgeois parties--without, however, endangering our ident.i.ty."

But the party was not willing to go as far as the veteran, and a resolution was adopted limiting such co-operation strictly to Prussia and giving the central committee full power to veto the acts any electoral district might take in this direction.

[40] _Protokoll_, 1910, p. 249.

[41] _Protokoll_, 1910, p. 272.

[42] In November, 1911, Berlin's new city hall was dedicated. The members of the city council were invited to be present. The Social Democrats cast a large majority of all the votes in Berlin. But the Social Democrats refused to attend the ceremonies. The program, as published, called for a "Hoch!" to the Kaiser, and the Social Democrats never joined in public approval of the government.

_Vorwarts_, the leading Social Democratic daily, said that Social Democrats have nothing to do with such a display of "Byzantinism." "If any one thought it necessary to shout 'Hoch!' he could shout 'Hoch!'

to the working population of Berlin."

[43] _Protokoll_, 1907, pp. 227-8.

[44] Amongst the business people of Mannheim, Munich, and other cities in Baden, Bavaria, and Hesse, there are many who support the Social Democratic candidates, because, they say, there is no genuinely liberal party. It should, however, be borne in mind that the Social Democrats of these southern districts are liberal and progressive, not the unbending, orthodox variety of Prussia.

[45] VON VOLLMAR, _uber die Aufgaben der Deutschen Social-Demokratie_.

[46] The _Hansa Bund_ (Hanseatic League), organized a few years ago, may be the nucleus of such a party. It is composed of smaller manufacturers and business men opposed to tariffs and the trusts, and in favor of a more liberal government.

[47] _Protokoll_, Social Democratic Party, 1907, p. 228.

[48] _Protokoll_, 1892, p. 132.

[49] _Protokoll_, 1907, p. 255.

[50] See _Die Sozial-Demokratie im Munchener Rathaus_, issued by the Bavarian party executive committee, 1908. Also _Die Sozial-Demokratie im Bayerischen Landtag, 1888-1905_, 3 vols., issued by the Party Press in Munich; and E. AUER, _Arbeiterpolitik im Bayerischen Landtag_.

CHAPTER IX

THE ENGLISH LABOR PARTY

I

We come now to the land of the industrial revolution--that colossal upheaval which changed the face of society, as the vast continental uplifts of past geological epochs changed the face of the earth. And just as the continents were centuries in settling themselves to their new conditions, so human society is now slowly adjusting itself to the conditions wrought by this violent change. One of the evidences of this gradual readjustment is Socialism. For to Socialism machine industry is a condition precedent. In this sense England has produced modern Socialism.

There is no blacker picture than the England of 1780 to 1840, and no drearier contrast than the quaint villages and their household industries of the earlier period and the "spreading of the hideous town," after Arkwright and Hargreaves and Watt. These inhuman conditions are faithfully and dispa.s.sionately revealed in the reports of the various Royal Commissions of Inquiry: statistical mines where Marx and Engels found abundant material for their philosophy of gloom.

And from these dull and depressing government folios Charles Kingsley drew his indignant invectives, and Carlyle his trenchant indictments against a society that would imprison its eight-year-old children, its mothers, and its grandmothers in dingy factories fourteen hours a day for the sake of profits, and then release them at night only to find lodgings in the most miserable hovels and rickety tenements. It is almost surprising to one familiar with the details of this gruesome record that a social revolution did not follow immediately in the wake of the industrial revolution.

There were riots at first, and machines were smashed. But the hand of the worker was impotent against the arm of steel. The workman soon resigned himself to his fate and his misery. The poor laws did not help, they only multiplied the burdens upon the state without taking the load from the poor. The laborer was too helpless to help himself, and the state and society were apathetic. The rapid expansion of industry found an ample outlet in the growing commerce to every corner of the world. England was making money. She was gradually shifting control from the traditional landowner to the new factory owner. The landed gentry had inherited a fine sense of patriarchal responsibility. The factory owner had no traditions. He was a parvenu.

His interests were machinery and ships, not politics and humanity. He acquiesced in the poor laws as the easiest way out of a miserable mess; he let private charity take its feeble and intermittent course, paying his rates and giving his donations with self-satisfied sanct.i.ty.

All this time labor was abundant. The markets of the world were hungry for the goods of English mills. Then came suddenly the Chartist Movement.[1] The flame of discontent spread and a revolution seemed impending. This first great outbreak of English labor was a political movement, fed by economic causes. The repeal of the corn laws and the pa.s.sage of the factory acts modified economic conditions and mollified labor for the time. The repeal of the corn laws brought cheaper food; the factory acts brought better conditions of labor.

Meanwhile individualism was evolving an economic creed. The Manchester doctrine was the logical outcome of England's insular position and her driving individualistic manufactures. But it was _laissez-faire_ in industrialism, not in unionism. The laboring men were now beginning to organize, and Cobden himself proposed the act that made unionism ineffective as a political force. However, indirectly, free trade stimulated labor, because it brought great prosperity, made work abundant, and employers sanguine. Unions now rapidly multiplied, but they were local, isolated. Their federation into a great national body came later.

Socialism, or unionism, or any other general movement cannot develop in England with the rapidity and enthusiasm that is shown for "movements" on the Continent. The traditions of the English people are const.i.tutional. Socialism can thrive among them only if it is "const.i.tutional," and the Fabians are to-day talking about "const.i.tutional Socialism" with judicial solemnity. All the training of the English people is contrary to the theory of progress through violence. They have had few revolutions accompanied by bloodshed, they have had a great many accompanied by prayers and Parliamentary oratory--"const.i.tutional" methods. They have, moreover, a real reverence for property. The poor who have none are taught to respect the rich who have. The Church, the common law, the statute law, the customs, all the sources of tradition and habit, have emphasized the sanct.i.ty of property. Only within the last few decades, as will be seen presently, has a radical change, a veritable revolution, come over the people in this respect.

The British temperament is not given to nerves. This stolid, phlegmatic, self-contained individualist has no inflammable material in his heart. Ruskin failed to arouse him, he wove too much artistry into his appeal; and Carlyle could not move him, his epigrams were too rhapsodical. Such temperaments are not given to rapid propagandism.

And finally, the Englishman is too practical to be a utopist. He concerns himself with the duties of to-day rather than the vagaries of to-morrow. Utopianism made no impression on him. Owen, the great Utopian, was a Welshman. The Celt has imagination. Nor do intricate theories or involved philosophies touch the mind of the Briton. The splendor that enraptures the Frenchman, the abstruse reasoning that delights the German, are alike boredom to this practical inventor of machinery and builder of ships.

In spite of these characteristics there is no country in Europe where there is more agitation about Socialism than there is in England to-day. It is discussed everywhere. Almost the entire time of Parliament during the past few years has been taken up with more or less "Socialistic" legislation. The public mind is steeped in it.

There is more actually being done in England toward the "socialization" of property, and the state, than in any other European country. And less being said about the theory of value, the cla.s.s war, capitalistic production, proletariat and bourgeois, and the other Continental pet phrases of Socialism.

Marx, who lived among the English for many years, but whose heart was never with them, would not call this rapid social movement Socialistic, because it does not avowedly "aim" at "socializing capitalistic production." The doings of the English are certainly not accomplished in the spirit of his orthodoxy. But the current toward state control, toward pure democracy, land nationalization, nationalization of railways and mines, has set in with the swiftness of a mill-race and is grinding grist with an amazing rapidity.

As I write these words, London and the whole country are wrought up over Lloyd George's Insurance Bill and the projected ballot reform bill. Meetings everywhere, fervid Parliamentary debate, the papers filled with letters from everybody; every organization, debating society, and board of directors of great industries pa.s.sing resolutions. Even the Labor Party is divided over the paternalistic measure that aims to bring relief to the sick and disabled working man and woman. Amidst all this discussion, noise, and party zeal is discerned the drift of the nation toward a new and unexpected goal.

Nowhere is it so difficult to define a Socialist, or to mark boundaries to the movement. But why mark sh.o.r.e-lines? The flood is on.

I will here take the position that whatever extends the functions of the state (community) over property, or into activities formerly left to individuals or to the home, is an indication of the Socialistic trend. Old-fashioned Socialists like Keir Hardie are constantly warning the people that what is now going on in England is only social reform, not Socialism. The Fabians, on the other hand, are exerting every effort to add to the swiftness of the present movement.

To a student of democracy things now pa.s.sing into law, and events now shaping into history, in England, are of peculiar significance. Such events, transpiring in a country so long abandoned to a rampant individualism, are portents of a newer time. They are signals of approaching changes to America, to us who have inherited the common law, the governmental traditions, the democratic ideals of liberty, if not the substantial stolidity of temperament and self-complacent egoism of the Briton.

All parties, Socialists and Conservatives, will admit this: that all this turmoil, these rapidly succeeding general elections, these public discussions, these new laws, indicate that a new social ideal is being formed. That in itself is worthy of consideration. For the ideal will shape the destiny.

II

Present-day Socialism in England seems to have risen to sudden magnitude from vacuity, to have permeated this cautious island over night. For over a generation all Socialism had disappeared from view.

The elaborate schemes of Owen, the altruistic propaganda under the gentle Kingsley and his n.o.ble companion Maurice, the artistic revolt against the ugliness of commercialism led by Ruskin, who even shared the toil of the breakers of stones to prove his sincerity--all these movements seem suddenly to have disappeared from the face of the island, like a glacial current dropping suddenly, without warning, into the depths of the Moulin.

England was given over to a highly prosperous industrialism. The Manchester doctrine was enthroned. Commercialism and a glittering pseudo-humanitarian internationalism found expression in the alternating victories of the astute Disraeli and the grandiloquent Gladstone.

Meanwhile poverty and misery infested the underplaces of the land, a poverty and misery that was appalling. Every protester was proudly pointed to the repeal of the corn laws, the revision of the poor laws, the reform act of 1832, and the factory acts.

When Sir Henry Vane had ascended the scaffold which his sacrifice made historic, he said: "The people of England have long been asleep; when they awake they will be hungry." When the England of to-day awoke it was to a greater hunger than the politically starved Roundhead or Cavalier ever endured.

It is no figure of speech to speak of hungry England. Its brilliant industrialism has always had a drab background of want. Chiozza Money says of the present position of labor: "The aggregate income of the 44,500,000 people in the United Kingdom in 1908-9 was approximately 1,844,000,000; 1,400,000 persons took 634,000,000; 4,100,000 persons took 275,000,000; 39,000,000 persons took 935,000,000."[2] And he sums up the condition as follows: "The position of the manual workers in relation to the general wealth of the country has not improved.