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* * * * *
SOCIALISM AND
DEMOCRACY IN
EUROPE
By
SAMUEL P. ORTH, PH.D.
_Author of "Five American Politicians" "Centralization of
Administration in Ohio," etc._
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1913
COPYRIGHT, 1913
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published January, 1913
THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N.J.
PREFACE
It is becoming more and more evident that democracy has served only
the first years of its apprenticeship. Political problems have served
only to introduce popular government. The economic problems now
rushing upon us will bring the real test of democracy.
The workingman has taken an advanced place in the struggle for the
democratization of industry. He has done so, first, through the
organization of labor unions; secondly, through the development of
political parties--labor parties. The blend of politics and economics
which he affects is loosely called Socialism. The term is as
indefinite in meaning as it is potent in influence. It has spread its
unctuous doctrines over every industrial land, and its representatives
sit in every important parliament, including our Congress.
Such a movement requires careful consideration from every point of
view.
It is the object of this volume to trace briefly the growth of the
movement in four leading European countries, and to attempt to
determine the relation of economic and political Socialism to
democracy--a question of peculiar interest to the friends of the
American Republic at this time.
In preparing this volume, the author has made extended visits to the
countries studied. He has tried to catch the spirit of the movement by
personal contact with the Socialist leaders and their antagonists,
and by many interviews with laboring men, the rank and file in every
country visited.
Everywhere he was received with the greatest cordiality, and he wishes
here to express his appreciation of these many kindnesses.
He wishes especially to acknowledge his obligations to the following
gentlemen: Mr. Graham Wallas of the University of London; Mr. W.G.
Towler of the London Municipal Society; Mr. John Hobson of London, and
Mr. J.S. Middleton, assistant secretary of the Labor Party; to Dr.
Robert Herz and Prof. Charles Gide of the University of Paris; Dr.
Albert Thomas and M. Adolphe Landry of the Chamber of Deputies; M.
Jean Longuet, editor of _L'Humanite_; to Dr. Franz Oppenheimer of the
University of Berlin; Dr. Suedekum of the Reichstag; Dr. Hilferding,
editor of _Vorwaerts_; Prof. T.H. Norton, American Consul at Chemnitz;
M. Camille Huysmans, secretary of the "International," Brussels; as
well as to many American friends for providing letters of introduction
which opened many useful and congenial doorways.
S.P.O.
January, 1913.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. WHY DOES SOCIALISM EXIST? 1
II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIALISM 17
III. The Political Awakening of Socialism--The Period
of Revolution 42
IV. THE POLITICAL AWAKENING OF SOCIALISM--THE
INTERNATIONAL 56
V. THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF FRANCE 75
VI. THE BELGIAN LABOR PARTY 118
VII. THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 146
VIII. GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND LABOR UNIONS 171
IX. THE ENGLISH LABOR PARTY 207
X. CONCLUSION 250
APPENDIX 273
INDEX 347
SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION--WHY DOES SOCIALISM EXIST?
The answer to this question will bring us nearer to the core of the
social movement than any attempted definition. The French Socialist
program begins with the assertion, "Socialism is a question of class."
Class distinction is the generator of Socialism.
The ordinary social triptych--upper, middle, and lower classes--will
not suffice us in our inquiry. We must distinguish between the
functions of the classes. The upper class is a remnant of the feudal
days, of the manorial times, when land-holding brought with it social
distinction and political prerogative. In this sense we have no upper
class in America. The middle class is composed of the business and
professional element, and the lower class of the wage-earning element.
There are two words, as yet quite unfamiliar to American readers,
which are met with constantly in European works on Socialism and are
heard on every hand in political discussions--_proletariat_ and
_bourgeois_. The proletariat are the wage-earning class, the poor,
the underlings. The bourgeois[1] are roughly the middle class. The
French divide them into _petits_ bourgeois and _grands_ bourgeois.
Werner Sombart divides them into lower middle class, the manual
laborers who represent the guild system, and bourgeoisie, the
representatives of the capitalistic system.[2]
It will thus be seen that these divisions have a historical basis. The
upper class reflect the days of feudalism, of governmental prerogative
and aristocracy. The middle class are the representatives of the guild
and mercantile systems, when hand labor and later business acumen
brought power and wealth to the craftsman and adventurer. The lower
class are the homologues of the slaves, the serfs, the toilers, whose
reward has constantly been measured by the standard of bare existence.
Socialism arises consciously out of the efforts of this class to win
for itself a share of the powers of the other classes. It is necessary
to understand that while this class distinction is historic in origin
it is essentially economic in fact. It is not "social"; a middle-class
millionaire may be congenial to the social circles of the high-born.
It is not political; a workingman may vote with any party he chooses.
He may ally himself with the conservative Center as he sometimes does
in Germany, or with the Liberal Party as he sometimes does in England,
or with either of the old parties as he does in the United States. On
the other hand, a bourgeois may be a Socialist and vote with the
proletarians. Indeed, many of the Socialist leaders belong to the
well-to-do middle class.
This class distinction, then, is economic. It is a distinction of
function, the function of the capitalist and the function of the
wage-earner. Let us go one step further; it is a distinction in
property. The possessor of private wealth can become a capitalist by
investing his money in productive enterprise. He then becomes the
employer of labor. There are all grades of capitalists, from the
master wagon-maker who works by the side of his one or two workmen, to
the "captain" of a vast industry that gives employment to thousands of
men and turns out a wagon a minute.
The institution of private property is the basis of Socialism because
it is the basis of capitalistic production. It places in one man's
hands the power of owning raw material, machinery, land, factory, and
finished product; and the power of hiring men to operate the
machinery, and to convert the raw material into marketable wares. As
long as this power was limited to hand industry the proletarian
movement was abortive. When the industrial revolution linked the
ingenuity of man to the power of nature it so multiplied the potency
of the possessor that the proletarian movement by stress of
circumstances became a great factor in industrial life.
While the possession either of wealth or family tradition was always
the basis of class distinction, the industrial revolution brought with
it the enormously multiplied power of capital and the glorification of
riches. The proletarians multiplied rapidly in number, and all the
evils of sharp class distinction were heightened. In all lands where
capitalistic production spread, the two classes grew farther apart,
the distinction between possessor and wage-earner increased.
It is not the mere possession of wealth, however, which forms the
animus of the Socialist movement. It is probably not even the abuse of
this wealth, although this is a large factor in the problem. It is the
psychological effect of the capitalist system that is the real
enginery of Socialism. It is the class feeling, the consciousness of
the workingman that he is contributing muscle and blood and sweat to
the perfection of an article whose possession he does not share. This
feeling is aroused by the contrasts of life that the worker constantly
sees around him. He feels that his own life energy has contributed to
the magnificent equipages and the palatial luxuries of his employer.
He compares his own lot and that of his family with the lot of the
capitalist. This feeling of envy is not blunted by the kaleidoscopic
suddenness with which changes of fortune can take place in America
to-day. By some stroke of luck or piece of ingenious planning, a
receiver of wages to-day may be the giver of wages to-morrow.
Nor does the spread of education and intelligence dull the contrasts.
It greatly heightens them. The workman can now begin to analyze the
conditions under which he lives. He ponders over the distinctions that
are actual and contrasts them with his imagined utopia. To him the
differences between employer and employee are not natural. He does not
attribute them to any fault or shortcoming or inferiority of his own,
nor of his master, but to a flaw in the organization of society. The
social order is wrong.
The workingman has become the critic. Here you have the heart of
Socialism. Whatever form its outward aspect may take, at heart it is a
rebellion against things as they are. And whatever may be the
syllogisms of its logic, or the formularies of its philosophy, they
all begin with a grievance, that things as they are are wrong; and
they all end in a hope for a better society of to-morrow where the
inequalities shall somehow be made right.
In his struggle toward a new economic ideal, the proletarian has
achieved a class homogeneity and self-consciousness. The individuality
that is denied him in industry he has sought and found among his own
brethren. In the great factory he loses even his name and becomes
number so-and-so. In his union and in his party he asserts his
individuality with a grim and impressive stubbornness. The gravitation
of common ideals and common protests draws these forgotten particles
of industrialism into a massed consciousness that is to-day one of the
world's great potencies. The very fact that we call this body of
workers "the masses" is significant. We speak of them as a geologist
speaks of his "basement complex." We recognize unconsciously that they
form the foundation of our economic life.
The class struggle, then, is between two clearly defined and
self-conscious elements in modern industrial life that are the natural
product of our machine industry. On the one hand is the business man
pursuing with fevered energy the profits that are the goal of his
activity; on the other hand are the workingmen who, more and more
sullen in their discontent, are clamoring louder each year for a
greater share of the wealth they believe their toil creates.
There is some reason to believe that this class basis of Socialism is
vanishing. In England J. Ramsay MacDonald denies its significance.[3]
Revisionists and progressive Socialists, who are throwing aside the
Marxian dogmas, are also preaching the universality of the Socialist
conception. However, the economic factor based on class functions
remains the essence of the social movement.[4]
What are the ideals of Socialism? They are not merely economic or
social, they embrace all life. After one has taken the pains to read
the more important mass of Socialist literature, books, pamphlets, and
some current newspapers and magazines, and has listened to their
orators and talked with their leaders, confusion still remains in the
mind. The movement is so all-embracing that it has no clearly defined
limits. The Socialists are feeling their way from protest into
practice. Their heads are in the clouds; of this you are certain as
you proceed through their books and listen to their speeches. But are
their feet upon the earth?
For a literature of protest against "suffering, misery, and
injustice," as Owen calls it, there is a wonderful buoyancy and hope
in their words. It is one of the secrets of its power that Socialism
is not the energy of despair. It is the demand for the right to live
fully, joyfully, and in comfort. The Socialists demand ozone in their
air, nutrition in their food, heartiness in their laughter, ease in
their homes, and their days must have hours of relaxation.
The awakening aspirations of the proletarian were expressed by one of
their own number, William Weitling, a tailor of Magdeburg. He
afterwards migrated to America and became one of our first Socialist
agitators. His book is called _Garantieen der Harmonie und Freiheit_
(Guaranties of Harmony and Liberty). The book is illogical, full of
contradictions, and all of the errors of a child's reasoning. But it
remains the workingman's classic philippic, one of the most trenchant
recitals of social wrongs, because it blends, with the illogical
terminology of sentimentalism, the assurance of hope. "Property," he
says, "is the root of all evil." Gold is the symbol of this world of
wrongs. "We have become as accustomed to our coppers as the devil to
his hell." When the rule of gold shall cease, then "the teardrops
which are the tokens of true brotherliness will return to the dry eyes
of the selfish, the soul of the evildoer will be filled with noble and
virtuous sentiments such as he had never known before, and the impious
ones who have hitherto denied God will sing His praise." The humble
tailor is assured that the reign of property will be terminated and
the age of humanity begin, and he calls to the workingman, "Forward,
brethren; with the curse of Mammon on our lips, let us await the hour
of our emancipation, when our tears will be transmuted into pearls of
dew, our earth transformed into a paradise, and all of mankind united
into one happy family."[5] Nor is the closing cry of his book without
an element of prophecy. He addresses the "mighty ones of this earth,"
admonishing them that they may secure the fame of Alexander and
Napoleon by the deeds of emancipation which lie in their power. "But
if you compel us (the proletarians) to undertake the task alone with
our raw material, then it will be accomplished only after weary toil
and pain to us and to you."
Let us turn to Robert Owen, who was at an early age the most
successful cotton spinner in England. He adapted an old philosophy to
a new humanitarianism. He saw that a "gradual increase in the number
of our paupers has accompanied our increasing wealth."[6] He began the
series of experiments which made his name familiar in England and
America and made him known in history as the greatest experimental
communist. His experiments have failed. But his hopefulness persists.
In his address delivered at the dedication of New Lanark, 1816, he
said that he had found plenty of unhappiness and plenty of misery.
"But from this day a change must take place; a new era must commence;
the human intellect, through the whole extent of the earth, hitherto
enveloped by the grossest ignorance and superstition, must begin to be
released from its state of darkness; nor shall nourishment henceforth
be given to the seeds of disunion and division among men. For the time
has come when the means may be prepared to train all the nations of
the world in that knowledge which shall _impel them not only to love
but to be actively kind to each other in the whole of their conduct,
without a single exception_."
Here is an all-inclusive hopefulness. Its significance is not
diminished by the fact that it was spoken of his own peculiar remedy
by education and environment.
This faith and hope runs through all their books like a golden song.
Excepting Marx, he was the great gloomy one. Even those who condemn
modern society with the most scathing adjectives link with their
denunciations the most sanguine sentences of hope.
The Christian Socialism of Kingsley is filled with optimism. "Look up,
my brother Christians, open your eyes, the hour of a new crusade has
struck."[7]
The song of the new crusade was sung by Robert Morris:
"Come, shoulder to shoulder ere the world grows older!
Help lies in naught but thee and me;
Hope is before us, the long years that bore us,
Bore leaders more than men may be.
"Let dead hearts tarry and trade and marry,
And trembling nurse their dreams of mirth,
While we, the living, our lives are giving
To bring the bright new world to birth."
This song of hope is sung to-day by thousands of marching Socialists.
Their bitter experiences in parliaments and in strikes, and all the
warfare of politics and trade, have not blighted their rosy hope. They
are still looking forward to "the bright new world," in which a new
social order shall reign.
Linked with this optimism is a certain prophetic tone, an elevation of
spirit that lifts some of their books out of the commonplace. The
sincerity of these prophets of Socialism contributes this quality more
than does their originality of mind.
In their search for happiness the Socialists see a great barrier in
their way. The barrier is want, poverty. There are no greater
contrasts, mental and temperamental, than between John Stuart Mill,
the erudite economist and philosopher, and H.G. Wells, the romancer
and sentimental critic of things as they are. Both begin their attacks
upon the social order at the same point--the vulnerable spot,
_poverty_. Mill places it first in his category of existing evils. He
asks, "What proportion of the population in the most civilized
countries of Europe enjoy, in their own person, anything worth naming
of the benefits of property?" "Suffice it to say that the condition of
numbers in civilized Europe, and even in England and France, is more
wretched than that of most tribes of savages who are known to us."[8]
Wells bases his racy criticism in his popular book, _New Worlds for
Old_, on the facts revealed in the reports of various charity
organizations in Edinburgh, York, and London. To both the exacting
economist and the popular expositor of Socialism, poverty is the
glaring fault of our social system. To Wells poverty is an "atrocious
failure in statesmanship."[9] To Mill it is "_pro tanto_ a failure of
the social arrangement."[10]
These examples are typical. Every school of Socialism finds in poverty
the curse, in private property the cause, of human misery, and in a
readjusted machinery of social production the hope of human
betterment.
All Socialists, learned and unlearned, agree that poverty is the
stumbling-block in the pathway to better social conditions. They all
agree as to the causes of poverty: first, private capitalistic
production; second, competition. It is private capitalistic production
that enables the employer to pocket all the profits; it is competition
that enables him to buy labor in an open market at the lowest possible
price, a price regulated by the necessities of bare existence. To the
Socialist, competition is anarchy, an anarchy that leaves "every man
free to ruin himself so that he may ruin another."[11]
To do away with private capital and to abolish competition means
bringing about a tremendous change in society. All Socialists
unhesitatingly and with boldness are ready, even eager, to make such a
change. The problem is not insuperable to them.
The three theories that underlie Socialism permit the hope of the
possibility of a social regeneration. These theories are, first, that
God made the world good, hence all you need to do is to revert to this
pristine goodness and the world is reformed. Second, that society is
what it is through evolution. If this is true then it is only
necessary to control by environment the factors of evolution and the
product will be preordained. Third, that even if man is bad and has
permitted pernicious institutions like private property to exist, he
can remake society by a bold effort, i.e., by revolution, because all
social power is vested in man and he can do as he likes. The ruling
class can impose its social order upon all. When the Socialist becomes
the ruling class his social system will be adopted.
This great change which the Socialist has in mind means the
substitution of co-operation for competition and the placing of
productive property in the care of the state or of society, instead
of letting it remain under the domination of individuals. To abolish
private productive capital by making it public, to establish a
communistic instead of a competitive society, that is the object.
In the Socialist's new order of society, where poverty will be
unknown, there is to be a common bond. This bond is not possession,
but work. With glowing exultation all the expositors and exhorters of
the proletarian movement dwell upon the blessedness of toil. They
glorify man, not through his inheritance of personality, certainly not
through his possession of things, but through his achievements of
toil.
When all members of society work at useful occupations, then all the
necessary things can be done in a few hours. Six or four, or some even
say two, hours a day will be sufficient to do all the drudgery and the
essential things in a well-organized human beehive. There is to be
nothing morose or despondent in this toil. It is all to be done to the
melody of good cheer and willingness.
How is this great change to come about, and what is to be the exact
organization of society under this regime of work and co-operation?
Here unanimity ceases. As a criticism Socialism is unanimous, as a
method it is divided, as a reconstructive process it is hopelessly at
sea.
At first Socialists were utopians, then they became revolutionists.
This was natural. Socialism was born in an air of revolution--the
political revolutions of the bourgeois, and the infinitely greater
industrial revolution. The tides of change and passion were rocking
the foundations of state and industry. The evils in early
industrialism were abhorrent. Small children and their mothers were
forced into factories, pauperism was thriving, the ugly machine-fed
towns were replacing the quaint and cheerful villages, rulers were
forgetting their duties in their greed for gain, and the state was
persecuting men for their political and economic opinions. Every face
was turned against the preachers of the new order, and they naturally
thought that the change could be brought about only by violence and
revolution. Louis Blanc said "a social revolution ought to be tried:
"Firstly, because the present social system is too full of iniquity,
misery, and turpitude to exist much longer.
"Secondly, because there is no one who is not interested, whatever his
position, rank, and fortune, in the inauguration of a new social
system.
"Thirdly, and lastly, because this revolution, so necessary, is
possible, even easy to accomplish peacefully."[12]
These are the naive words of a young man of thirty-seven, the youngest
member of the ill-fated revolutionary government of France in 1848.
Not every one thought that the revolution could be peacefully
accomplished, and, it must be admitted, few seemed to care.
In their "Communist Manifesto," the most noted of all Socialist
broadsides, Marx and Engels know of no peaceful revolution. They close
with these virile words: "The communists disdain to conceal their
views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained
only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. Let the
ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians
have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win.
Workingmen of all countries, unite!"
These words are often quoted even in these placid days of evolution
that have replaced the red days of violence. The workingmen of all
countries are uniting, as we shall see, not for bloody revolution nor
for the violence of passion, but for the promulgation of peace. To-day
the silent coercion of multitudes is taking the place of the eruptive
methods of the '40's and the '70's.
As to the ultimate form of organized society, there is nothing but
confusion to be found in the mass of literature that has grown up
around the subject. The earliest writers were cocksure of themselves;
the latest ones bridge over the question with wide-arching
generalities. I have asked many of their leaders to give me some hint
as to what form their Society of To-morrow will take. Every one
dodged. "No one can tell. It will be humanitarian and co-operative."
If one could be assured of this!
Finally, all Socialists agree in the instrument of change. It lies at
hand as the greatest co-operative achievement of our race, the state.
It is the common possession of all, and it is the one power that can
lay its hands upon property and compel its obedience. The power of the
state is to be the dynamo of change. This state is naturally to be
democratic. The people shall hold the reins of power in their own
hands.
It must be remembered that every year sees a shifting in the
Socialist's attitude. As he has left the sphere of mere fault-finding
and of dreaming, and has entered politics, entered the labor war
through unions, and the business war through co-operative societies,
he has been compelled to adapt himself to the necessities of things as
they are.
I have tried briefly to show that Socialism originated as a class
movement, a proletarian movement; that the classes, wage-earner and
capitalist, are the natural outcome of machine production; that
Socialism is one of the natural products of the antagonistic relations
that these two classes at present occupy; that Socialism intends to
eliminate this antagonism by eliminating the private employer. I have
tried to show also that Socialism is a criticism of the present social
order placing the blame for the miseries of society upon the shoulders
of private property and competition; that it is optimistic in spirit,
buoyant in hope; and that its program of reconstruction is confused
and immature.
Stripped of its glamour, our society is in a neck-to-neck race for
things, for property. Its hideousness has shocked the sensibilities of
dreamers and humanitarians. Our machine industry has produced a
civilization that is ugly. It is natural that the esthetic and
philanthropic members of this society should raise their protest.
Ruskin and Anatole France and Maeterlinck and Carlyle and Robert
Morris and Emerson and Grierson are read with increasing satisfaction.
It is natural that the participants in this death race should utter
their cries of alternate despair and hope. Socialism is the cry of the
toiler. It is not to be ignored. We in America have no conception of
its potency. There are millions of hearts in Europe hanging upon its
precepts for the hope that makes life worth the fight.
Their Utopia may be only a rainbow, a mirage in the mists on the
horizon. But the energy which it has inspired is a reality. It has
organized the largest body of human beings that the world has known.
Its international Socialist movement has but one rival for homogeneity
and zeal, the Church, whose organization at one time embraced all
kingdoms and enlisted the faithful service of princes and paupers.
It is this reality in its political form which I hope to set forth in
the following pages. We will try to discover what the Socialist
movement is doing in politics, how much of theory has been merged in
political practice, what its everyday parliamentary drudgery is, and,
if possible, to tell in what direction the movement is tending.
Before we do this it is necessary to state briefly the history of the
underlying theories of the movement.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners
of the means of social production, and employers of wage-labor. By
proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers, who, having no means
of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power
in order to live."--FREDERICK ENGELS, _Notes on the Communist
Manifesto_, 1888.
[2] See SOMBART, _Socialism and the Social Movement_, Introduction,
for discussion of the class movement.
[3] _The Socialist Movement_, p. 147.
[4] The all-embracing character of Socialism was eloquently phrased by
Millerand in 1896: "In its large synthesis Socialism embraces every
manifestation of life, because nothing human is alien to it, because
it alone offers to-day to our hunger for justice and happiness an
ideal, purely human and apart from all dogma." See ENSOR, _Modern
Socialism_, p. 53.
[5] _Garantieen der Harmonie und Freiheit_, pp. 57-58, edition of
1845.
[6] Letter I, addressed to David Ricardo.
[7] Tract No. IV.
[8] _Socialism_, pp. 71-72.
[9] WELLS, _New Worlds for Old_, p. 36.
[10] MILL, _Socialism_, p. 72.
[11] LOUIS BLANC, _The Right to Labor_, p. 63.
[12] _Organization of Labor_, p. 87, 1847.