EVERY age has had its hopes, hopes that look to something beyond the life
of the age itself, hopes that try to pierce into the future; and, strange
to say, I believe that those hopes have been stronger not in the heyday
of the epoch which has given them birth, but rather in its decadence and
times of corruption: in sober truth it may well be that these hopes are
but a reflection in those that live happily and comfortably of the vain
longings of those others who suffer with little power of expressing their
sufferings in an audible voice: when all goes well the happy world
forgets these people and their desires, sure as it is that their woes are
not dangerous to them the wealthy: whereas when the woes and grief of the
poor begin to rise to a point beyond the endurance of men, fear conscious
or unconscious falls upon the rich, and they begin to look about them to
see what there may be among the elements of their society which may be
used as palliatives for the misery which, long existing and ever growing
greater among the slaves of that society, is now at last forcing itself
on the attention of the masters. Times of change, disruption, and
revolution are naturally times of hope also, and not seldom the hopes of
something better to come are the first tokens that tell people that
revolution is at hand, though commonly such tokens are no more believed
than Cassandra’s prophecies, or are even taken in a contrary sense by
those who have anything to lose; since they look upon them as signs of
the prosperity of the times, and the long endurance of that state of
things which is so kind to them. Let us then see what the hopes of
civilization are like to-day: for indeed I purpose speaking of our own
times chiefly, and will leave for the present all mention of that older
civilization which was destroyed by the healthy barbarism out of which
our present society has grown.
Yet a few words may be necessary concerning the birth of our present
epoch and the hopes it gave rise to, and what has become of them: that
will not take us very far back in history; as to my mind our modern
civilization begins with the stirring period about the time of the
Reformation in England, the time which in the then more important
countries of the Continent is known as the period of the Renaissance, the
so-called new-birth of art and learning.
And first remember that this period includes the death-throes of
feudalism, with all the good and evil which that system bore with it.
For centuries past its end was getting ready by the gradual weakening of
the bonds of the great hierarchy which held men together: the
characteristics of those bonds were, theoretically at least, personal
rights and personal duties between superior and inferior all down the
scale; each man was born, so to say, subject to these conditions, and the
mere accidents of his life could not free him from them: commerce, in our
sense of the word, there was none; capitalistic manufacture, capitalistic
exchange was unknown: to buy goods cheap that you might sell them dear
was a legal offence (forestalling): to buy goods in the market in the
morning and to sell them in the afternoon in the same place was not
thought a useful occupation and was forbidden under the name of
regrating; usury, instead of leading as now directly to the highest
offices of the State, was thought wrong, and the profit of it mostly fell
to the chosen people of God: the robbery of the workers, thought
necessary then as now to the very existence of the State, was carried out
quite crudely without any concealment or excuse by arbitrary taxation or
open violence: on the other hand, life was easy, and common necessaries
plenteous; the holidays of the Church were holidays in the modern sense
of the word, downright play-days, and there were ninety-six obligatory
ones: nor were the people tame and sheep-like, but as rough-handed and
bold a set of good fellows as ever rubbed through life under the sun.
I remember three passages, from contemporary history or gossip, about the
life of those times which luck has left us, and which illustrate
curiously the change that has taken place in the habits of Englishmen. A
lady writing from Norfolk 400 years ago to her husband in London, amidst
various commissions for tapestries, groceries, and gowns, bids him also
not to forget to bring back with him a good supply of cross-bows and
bolts, since the windows of their hall were too low to be handy for
long-bow shooting. A German traveller, writing quite at the end of the
mediæval period, speaks of the English as the laziest and proudest people
and the best cooks in Europe. A Spanish ambassador about the same period
says, “These English live in houses built of sticks and mud, {87} but
therein they fare as plenteously as lords.”
Indeed, I confess that it is with a strange emotion that I recall these
times and try to realize the life of our forefathers, men who were named
like ourselves, spoke nearly the same tongue, lived on the same spots of
earth, and therewithal were as different from us in manners, habits, ways
of life and thought, as though they lived in another planet. The very
face of the country has changed; not merely I mean in London and the
great manufacturing centres, but through the country generally; there is
no piece of English ground, except such places as Salisbury Plain, but
bears witness to the amazing change which 400 years has brought upon us.
Not seldom I please myself with trying to realize the face of mediæval
England; the many chases and great woods, the stretches of common tillage
and common pasture quite unenclosed; the rough husbandry of the tilled
parts, the unimproved breeds of cattle, sheep, and swine; especially the
latter, so lank and long and lathy, looking so strange to us; the strings
of packhorses along the bridle-roads, the scantiness of the wheel-roads,
scarce any except those left by the Romans, and those made from monastery
to monastery: the scarcity of bridges, and people using ferries instead,
or fords where they could; the little towns, well bechurched, often
walled; the villages just where they are now (except for those that have
nothing but the church left to tell of them), but better and more
populous; their churches, some big and handsome, some small and curious,
but all crowded with altars and furniture, and gay with pictures and
ornament; the many religious houses, with their glorious architecture;
the beautiful manor-houses, some of them castles once, and survivals from
an earlier period; some new and elegant; some out of all proportion small
for the importance of their lords. How strange it would be to us if we
could be landed in fourteenth century England; unless we saw the crest of
some familiar hill, like that which yet bears upon it a symbol of an
English tribe, and from which, looking down on the plain where Alfred was
born, I once had many such ponderings, we should not know into what
country of the world we were come: the name is left, scarce a thing else.
And when I think of this it quickens my hope of what may be: even so it
will be with us in time to come; all will have changed, and another
people will be dwelling here in England, who, although they may be of our
blood and bear our name, will wonder how we lived in the nineteenth
century.
Well, under all that rigidly ordered caste society of the fourteenth
century, with its rough plenty, its sauntering life, its cool acceptance
of rudeness and violence, there was going on a keen struggle of classes
which carried with it the hope of progress of those days: the serfs
gradually getting freed, and becoming some of them the town population,
the first journeymen, or “free-labourers,” so called, some of them the
copyholders of agricultural land: the corporations of the towns gathered
power, the craft-gilds grew into perfection and corruption, the power of
the Crown increased, attended with nascent bureaucracy; in short, the
middle class was forming underneath the outward show of feudalism still
intact: and all was getting ready for the beginning of the great
commercial epoch in whose _latter_ days I would fain hope we are living.
That epoch began with the portentous change of agriculture which meant
cultivating for profit instead of for livelihood, and which carried with
it the expropriation of the _people_ from the land, the extinction of the
yeoman, and the rise of the capitalist farmer; and the growth of the town
population, which, swelled by the drift of the landless vagabonds and
masterless men, grew into a definite proletariat or class of
free-workmen; and their existence made that of the embryo
capitalist-manufacturer also possible; and the reign of commercial
contract and cash payment began to take the place of the old feudal
hierarchy, with its many-linked chain of personal responsibilities. The
latter half of the seventeenth century, the reign of Charles II., saw the
last blow struck at this feudal system, when the landowners’ military
service was abolished, and they became simple owners of property that had
no duties attached to it save the payment of a land-tax.
The hopes of the early part of the commercial period may be read in
almost every book of the time, expressed in various degrees of dull or
amusing pedantry, and show a naïf arrogance and contempt of the times
just past through which nothing but the utmost simplicity of ignorance
could have attained to. But the times were stirring, and gave birth to
the most powerful individualities in many branches of literature, and
More and Campanella, at least from the midst of the exuberant triumph of
young commercialism, gave to the world prophetic hopes of times yet to
come when that commercialism itself should have given place to the
society which we hope will be the next transform of civilization into
something else; into a new social life.
This period of early and exuberant hopes passed into the next stage of
sober realization of many of them, for commerce grew and grew, and
moulded all society to its needs: the workman of the sixteenth century
worked still as an individual with little co-operation, and scarce any
division of labour: by the end of the seventeenth he had become only a
part of a group which by that time was in the handicrafts the real unit
of production; division of labour even at that period had quite destroyed
his individuality, and the worker was but part of a machine: all through
the eighteenth century this system went on progressing towards
perfection, till to most men of that period, to most of those who were in
any way capable of expressing their thoughts, civilization had already
reached a high stage of perfection, and was certain to go on from better
to better.
These hopes were not on the surface of a very revolutionary kind, but
nevertheless the class struggle still went on, and quite openly too; for
the remains of feudality, aided by the mere mask and grimace of the
religion, which was once a real part of the feudal system, hampered the
progress of commerce sorely, and seemed a thousandfold more powerful than
it really was; because in spite of the class struggle there was really a
covert alliance between the powerful middle classes who were the children
of commerce and their old masters the aristocracy; an unconscious
understanding between them rather, in the midst of their contest, that
certain matters were to be respected even by the advanced party: the
contest and civil war between the king and the commons in England in the
seventeenth century illustrates this well: the caution with which
privilege was attacked in the beginning of the struggle, the
unwillingness of all the leaders save a few enthusiasts to carry matters
to their logical consequences, even when the march of events had
developed the antagonism between aristocratic privilege and middle-class
freedom of contract (so called); finally, the crystallization of the new
order conquered by the sword of Naseby into a mongrel condition of things
between privilege and bourgeois freedom, the defeat and grief of the
purist Republicans, and the horror at and swift extinction of the
Levellers, the pioneers of Socialism in that day, all point to the fact
that the “party of progress,” as we should call it now, was determined
after all that privilege should not be abolished further than its own
standpoint.
The seventeenth century ended in the great Whig revolution in England,
and, as I said, commerce throve and grew enormously, and the power of the
middle classes increased proportionately and all things seemed going
smoothly with them, till at last in France the culminating corruption of
a society, still nominally existing for the benefit of the privileged
aristocracy, forced their hand: the old order of things, backed as it was
by the power of the executive, by that semblance of overwhelming physical
force which is the real and only cement of a society founded on the
slavery of the many—the aristocratic power, seemed strong and almost
inexpugnable: and since any stick will do to beat a dog with, the middle
classes in France were forced to take up the first stick that lay ready
to hand if they were not to give way to the aristocrats, which indeed the
whole evolution of history forbade them to do. Therefore, as in England
in the seventeenth century, the middle classes allied themselves to
religious and republican, and even communistic enthusiasts, with the
intention, firm though unexpressed, to keep them down when they had
mounted to power by their means, so in France they had to ally themselves
with the proletariat; which, shamefully oppressed and degraded as it had
been, now for the first time in history began to feel its power, the
power of numbers: by means of this help they triumphed over aristocratic
privilege, but, on the other hand, although the proletariat was speedily
reduced again to a position not much better than that it had held before
the revolution, the part it played therein gave a new and terrible
character to that revolution, and from that time forward the class
struggle entered on to a new phase; the middle classes had gained a
complete victory, which in France carried with it all the outward signs
of victory, though in England they chose to consider a certain part of
themselves an aristocracy, who had indeed little signs of aristocracy
about them either for good or for evil, being in very few cases of long
descent, and being in their manners and ideas unmistakably _bourgeois_.
So was accomplished the second act of the great class struggle with whose
first act began the age of commerce; as to the hopes of this period of
the revolution we all know how extravagant they were; what a complete
regeneration of the world was expected to result from the abolition of
the grossest form of privilege; and I must say that, before we mock at
the extravagance of those hopes, we should try to put ourselves in the
place of those that held them, and try to conceive how the privilege of
the old noblesse must have galled the respectable well-to-do people of
that time. Well, the reasonable part of those hopes were realized by the
revolution; in other words, it accomplished what it really aimed at, the
freeing of commerce from the fetters of sham feudality; or, in other
words, the destruction of aristocratic privilege. The more extravagant
part of the hopes expressed by the eighteenth century revolution were
vague enough, and tended in the direction of supposing that the working
classes would be benefited by what was to the interest of the middle
class in some way quite unexplained—by a kind of magic, one may say—which
welfare of the workers, as it was never directly aimed at, but only hoped
for by the way, so also did not come about by any such magical means, and
the triumphant middle classes began gradually to find themselves looked
upon no longer as rebellious servants, but as oppressive masters.
The middle class had freed commerce from her fetters of privilege, and
had freed thought from her fetters of theology, at least partially; but
it had not freed, nor attempted to free, labour from its fetters. The
leaders of the French Revolution, even amidst the fears, suspicions and
slaughter of the Terror, upheld the rights of “property” so called,
though a new pioneer or prophet appeared in France, analogous in some
respects to the Levellers of Cromwell’s time, but, as might be expected,
far more advanced and reasonable than they were. Gracchus Babeuf and his
fellows were treated as criminals, and died or suffered the torture of
prison for attempting to put into practice those words which the Republic
still carried on its banners, and Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality were
interpreted in a middle-class, or if you please a Jesuitical, sense, as
the rewards of success for those who could struggle into an exclusive
class; and at last property had to be defended by a military adventurer,
and the Revolution seemed to have ended with Napoleonism.
Nevertheless, the Revolution was not dead, nor was it possible to say
thus far and no further to the rising tide. Commerce, which had created
the propertyless proletariat throughout civilization had still another
part to play, which is not yet played out; she had and has to teach the
workers to know what they are; to educate them, to consolidate them, and
not only to give them aspirations for their advancement as a class, but
to make means for them to realize those aspirations. All this she did,
nor loitered in her work either; from the beginning of the nineteenth
century the history of civilization is really the history of the last of
the class-struggles which was inaugurated by the French Revolution; and
England, who all through the times of the Revolution and the Cæsarism
which followed it appeared to be the steady foe of Revolution, was really
as steadily furthering it; her natural conditions, her store of coal and
minerals, her temperate climate, extensive sea-board and many harbours,
and lastly her position as the outpost of Europe looking into America
across the ocean, doomed her to be for a time at least the mistress of
the commerce of the civilized world, and its agent with barbarous and
semi-barbarous countries. The necessities of this destiny drove her into
the implacable war with France, a war which, nominally waged on behalf of
monarchical principles, was really, though doubtless unconsciously,
carried on for the possession of the foreign and colonial markets. She
came out victorious from that war, and fully prepared to take advantage
of the industrial revolution which had been going on the while, and which
I now ask you to note.
I have said that the eighteenth century perfected the system of labour
which took the place of the mediæval system, under which a workman
individually carried his piece of work all through its various stages
from the first to the last.
This new system, the first change in industrial production since the
Middle Ages, is known as the system of division of labour, wherein, as I
said, the unit of labour is a group, not a man; the individual workman in
this system is kept life-long at the performance of some task quite petty
in itself, and which he soon masters, and having mastered it has nothing
more to do but to go on increasing his speed of hand under the spur of
competition with his fellows, until he has become the perfect machine
which it is his ultimate duty to become, since without attaining to that
end he must die or become a pauper. You can well imagine how this
glorious invention of division of labour, this complete destruction of
individuality in the workman, and his apparent hopeless enslavement to
his profit-grinding master, stimulated the hopes of civilization;
probably more hymns have been sung in praise of division of labour, more
sermons preached about it, than have done homage to the precept, “do unto
others as ye would they should do unto you.”
To drop all irony, surely this was one of those stages of civilization at
which one might well say that, if it was to stop there, it was a pity
that it had ever got so far. I have had to study books and methods of
work of the eighteenth century a good deal, French chiefly; and I must
say that the impression made on me by that study is that the eighteenth
century artisan must have been a terrible product of civilization, and
quite in a condition to give rise to _hopes_—of the torch, the pike, and
the guillotine.
However, civilization was not going to stop there; having turned the man
into a machine, the next stage for commerce to aim at was to contrive
machines which would widely dispense with human labour; nor was this aim
altogether disappointed.
Now, at first sight it would seem that having got the workman into such a
plight as he was, as the slave of division of labour, this new invention
of machines which should free him from a part of his labour at least,
could be nothing to him but an unmixed blessing. Doubtless it will prove
to have been so in the end, when certain institutions have been swept
away which most people now look on as eternal; but a longish time has
passed during which the workman’s hopes of civilization have been
disappointed, for those who invented the machines, or rather who profited
by their invention, did not aim at the saving of labour in the sense of
reducing the labour which each man had to do, but, first taking it for
granted that every workman would have to work as long as he could stand
up to it, aimed, under those conditions of labour, at producing the
utmost possible amount of goods which they could sell at a profit.
Need I dwell on the fact that, under these circumstances, the invention
of the machines has benefited the workman but little even to this day?
Nay, at first they made his position worse than it had been: for, being
thrust on the world very suddenly, they distinctly brought about an
industrial revolution, changing everything suddenly and completely;
industrial productiveness was increased prodigiously, but so far from the
workers reaping the benefit of this, they were thrown out of work in
enormous numbers, while those who were still employed were reduced from
the position of skilled artisans to that of unskilled labourers: the aims
of their masters being, as I said, to make a profit, they did not trouble
themselves about this as a class, but took it for granted that it was
something that couldn’t be helped and didn’t hurt _them_; nor did they
think of offering to the workers that compensation for harassed interests
which they have since made a point of claiming so loudly for themselves.
This was the state of things which followed on the conclusion of European
peace, and even that peace itself rather made matters worse than better,
by the sudden cessation of all war industries, and the throwing on to the
market many thousands of soldiers and sailors: in short, at no period of
English history was the condition of the workers worse than in the early
years of the nineteenth century.
There seem during this period to have been two currents of hope that had
reference to the working classes: the first affected the masters, the
second the men.
In England, and, in what I am saying of this period, I am chiefly
thinking of England, the hopes of the richer classes ran high; and no
wonder; for England had by this time become the mistress of the markets
of the world, and also, as the people of that period were never weary of
boasting, the workshop of the world: the increase in the riches of the
country was enormous, even at the early period I am thinking of now—prior
to ’48, I mean—though it increased much more speedily in times that we
have all seen: but part of the jubilant hopes of this newly rich man
concerned his servants, the instruments of his fortune: it was hoped that
the population in general would grow wiser, better educated, thriftier,
more industrious, more comfortable; for which hope there was surely some
foundation, since man’s mastery over the forces of Nature was growing
yearly towards completion; but you see these benevolent gentlemen
supposed that these hopes would be realized perhaps by some unexplained
magic as aforesaid, or perhaps by the working-classes, _at their own
expense_, by the exercise of virtues supposed to be specially suited to
their condition, and called, by their masters, “thrift” and “industry.”
For this latter supposition there was no foundation: indeed, the poor
wretches who were thrown out of work by the triumphant march of commerce
had perforce worn thrift threadbare, and could hardly better their
exploits in _that_ direction; while as to those who worked in the
factories, or who formed the fringe of labour elsewhere, industry was no
new gospel to them, since they already worked as long as they could work
without dying at the loom, the spindle, or the stithy. They for their
part had their hopes, vague enough as to their ultimate aim, but
expressed in the passing day by a very obvious tendency to revolt: this
tendency took various forms, which I cannot dwell on here, but settled
down at last into Chartism: about which I must speak a few words: but
first I must mention, I can scarce do more, the honoured name of Robert
Owen, as representative of the nobler hopes of his day, just as More was
of his, and the lifter of the torch of Socialism amidst the dark days of
the confusion consequent on the reckless greed of the early period of the
great factory industries.
That the conditions under which man lived could affect his life and his
deeds infinitely, that not selfish greed and ceaseless contention, but
brotherhood and co-operation were the bases of true society, was the
gospel which he preached and also practised with a single-heartedness,
devotion, and fervour of hope which have never been surpassed: he was the
embodied hope of the days when the advance of knowledge and the
sufferings of the people thrust revolutionary hope upon those thinkers
who were not in some form or other in the pay of the sordid masters of
society.
As to the Chartist agitation, there is this to be said of it, that it was
thoroughly a working-class movement, and it was caused by the simplest
and most powerful of all causes—hunger. It is noteworthy that it was
strongest, especially in its earlier days, in the Northern and Midland
manufacturing districts—that is, in the places which felt the distress
caused by the industrial revolution most sorely and directly; it sprang
up with particular vigour in the years immediately following the great
Reform Bill; and it has been remarked that disappointment of the hopes
which that measure had cherished had something to do with its bitterness.
As it went on, obvious causes for failure were developed in it;
self-seeking leadership; futile discussion of the means of making the
change, before organization of the party was perfected; blind fear of
ultimate consequences on the part of some, blind disregard to immediate
consequences on the part of others; these were the surface reasons for
its failure: but it would have triumphed over all these and accomplished
revolution in England, if it had not been for causes deeper and more
vital than these. Chartism differed from mere Radicalism in being a
class movement; but its aim was after all political rather than social.
The Socialism of Robert Owen fell short of its object because it did not
understand that, as long as there is a privileged class in possession of
the executive power, they will take good care that their economical
position, which enables them to live on the unpaid labour of the people,
is not tampered with: the hopes of the Chartists were disappointed
because they did not understand that true political freedom is impossible
to people who are economically enslaved: there is no first and second in
these matters, the two must go hand in hand together: we cannot live as
we will, and as we should, as long as we allow people to _govern_ us
whose interest it is that we should live as _they_ will, and by no means
as we should; neither is it any use claiming the right to manage our own
business unless we are prepared to have some business of our own: these
two aims united mean the furthering of the class struggle till all
classes are abolished—the divorce of one from the other is fatal to any
hope of social advancement.
Chartism therefore, though a genuine popular movement, was incomplete in
its aims and knowledge; the time was not yet come and it could not
triumph openly; but it would be a mistake to say that it failed utterly:
at least it kept alive the holy flame of discontent; it made it possible
for us to attain to the political goal of democracy, and thereby to
advance the cause of the people by the gain of a stage from whence could
be seen the fresh gain to be aimed at.
I have said that the time for revolution had not then come: the great
wave of commercial success went on swelling, and though the capitalists
would if they had dared have engrossed the whole of the advantages
thereby gained at the expense of their wage slaves, the Chartist revolt
warned them that it was not safe to attempt it. They were _forced_ to
try to allay discontent by palliative measures. They had to allow
Factory Acts to be passed regulating the hours and conditions of labour
of women and children, and consequently of men also in some of the more
important and consolidated industries; they were _forced_ to repeal the
ferocious laws against combination among the workmen; so that the Trades
Unions won for themselves a legal position and became a power in the
labour question, and were able by means of strikes and threats of strikes
to regulate the wages granted to the workers, and to raise the standard
of livelihood for a certain part of the skilled workmen and the labourers
associated with them: though the main part of the unskilled, including
the agricultural workmen, were no better off than before.
Thus was damped down the flame of a discontent vague in its aims, and
passionately crying out for what, if granted, it could not have used:
twenty years ago any one hinting at the possibility of serious class
discontent in this country would have been looked upon as a madman; in
fact, the well-to-do and cultivated were quite unconscious (as many still
are) that there was any class distinction in this country other than what
was made by the rags and cast clothes of feudalism, which in a
perfunctory manner they still attacked.
There was no sign of revolutionary feeling in England twenty years ago:
the middle class were so rich that they had no need to hope for
anything—but a heaven which they did not believe in: the well-to-do
working men did not hope, since they were not pinched and had no means of
learning their degraded position: and lastly, the drudges of the
proletariat had such hope as charity, the hospital, the workhouse, and
kind death at last could offer them.
In this stock-jobbers’ heaven let us leave our dear countrymen for a
little, while I say a few words about the affairs of the people on the
continent of Europe. Things were not quite so smooth for the fleecer
there: Socialist thinkers and writers had arisen about the same time as
Robert Owen; St. Simon, Proudhon, Fourier and his followers kept up the
traditions of hope in the midst of a _bourgeois_ world. Amongst these
Fourier is the one that calls for most attention: since his doctrine of
the necessity and possibility of making labour attractive is one which
Socialism can by no means do without. France also kept up the
revolutionary and insurrectionary tradition, the result of something like
hope still fermenting amongst the proletariat: she fell at last into the
clutches of a second Cæsarism developed by the basest set of sharpers,
swindlers, and harlots that ever insulted a country, and of whom our own
happy _bourgeois_ at home made heroes and heroines: the hideous open
corruption of Parisian society, to which, I repeat, our respectable
classes accorded heartfelt sympathy, was finally swept away by the
horrors of a race war: the defeats and disgraces of this war developed,
on the one hand, an increase in the wooden implacability and baseness of
the French _bourgeois_, but on the other made way for revolutionary hope
to spring again, from which resulted the attempt to establish society on
the basis of the freedom of labour, which we call the Commune of Paris of
1871. Whatever mistakes or imprudences were made in this attempt, and
all wars blossom thick with such mistakes, I will leave the reactionary
enemies of the people’s cause to put forward: the immediate and obvious
result was the slaughter of thousands of brave and honest revolutionists
at the hands of the respectable classes, the loss in fact of an army for
the popular cause: but we may be sure that the results of the Commune
will not stop there: to all Socialists that heroic attempt will give hope
and ardour in the cause as long as it is to be won; we feel as though the
Paris workman had striven to bring the day-dawn for us, and had lifted us
the sun’s rim over the horizon, never to set in utter darkness again: of
such attempts one must say, that though those who perished in them might
have been put in a better place in the battle, yet after all brave men
never die for nothing, when they die for principle.
Let us shift from France to Germany before we get back to England again,
and conclude with a few words about our hopes at the present day. To
Germany we owe the school of economists, at whose head stands the name of
Karl Marx, who have made modern Socialism what it is: the earlier
Socialist writers and preachers based their hopes on man being taught to
see the desirableness of co-operation taking the place of competition,
and adopting the change voluntarily and consciously, and they trusted to
schemes more or less artificial being tried and accepted, although such
schemes were necessarily constructed out of the materials which
capitalistic society offered: but the new school, starting with an
historical view of what had been, and seeing that a law of evolution
swayed all events in it, was able to point out to us that the evolution
was still going on, and that, whether Socialism be desirable or not, it
is at least inevitable. Here then was at last a hope of a different kind
to any that had gone before it; and the German and Austrian workmen were
not slow to learn the lesson founded on this theory; from being one of
the most backward countries in Europe in the movement, before Lassalle
started his German workman’s party in 1863, Germany soon became the
leader in it: Bismarck’s repressive law has only acted on opinion there,
as the roller does to the growing grass—made it firmer and stronger; and
whatever vicissitudes may be the fate of the party as a party, there can
be no doubt that Socialistic opinion is firmly established there, and
that when the time is ripe for it that opinion will express itself in
action.
Now, in all I have been saying, I have been wanting you to trace the fact
that, ever since the establishment of commercialism on the ruins of
feudality, there has been growing a steady feeling on the part of the
workers that they are a class dealt with as a class, and in like manner
to deal with others; and that as this class feeling has grown, so also
has grown with it a consciousness of the antagonism between their class
and the class which employs it, as the phrase goes; that is to say, which
lives by means of its labour.
Now it is just this growing consciousness of the fact that as long as
there exists in society a propertied class living on the labour of a
propertyless one, there _must_ be a struggle always going on between
those two classes—it is just the dawning knowledge of this fact which
should show us what civilization can hope for—namely, transformation into
true society, in which there will no longer be classes with their
necessary struggle for existence and superiority: for the antagonism of
classes which began in all simplicity between the master and the chattel
slave of ancient society, and was continued between the feudal lord and
the serf of mediæval society, has gradually become the contention between
the capitalist developed from the workman of the last-named period, and
the wage-earner: in the former struggle the rise of the artisan and
villenage tenant created a new class, the middle class, while the place
of the old serf was filled by the propertyless labourer, with whom the
middle class, which has absorbed the aristocracy, is now face to face:
the struggle between the classes therefore is once again a simple one, as
in the days of the classical peoples; but since there is no longer any
strong race left out of civilization, as in the time of the disruption of
Rome, the whole struggle in all its simplicity between those who have and
those who lack is _within_ civilization.
Moreover, the capitalist or modern slave-owner has been forced by his
very success, as we have seen, to organize his slaves, the wage-earners,
into a co-operation for production so well arranged that it requires
little but his own elimination to make it a foundation for communal life:
in the teeth also of the experience of past ages, he has been compelled
to allow a modicum of education to the propertyless, and has not even
been able to deprive them wholly of political rights; his own advance in
wealth and power has bred for him the very enemy who is doomed to make an
end of him.
But will there be any new class to take the place of the present
proletariat when that has triumphed, as it must do, over the present
privileged class? We cannot foresee the future, but we may fairly hope
not: at least we cannot see any signs of such a new class forming. It is
impossible to see how destruction of privilege can stop short of absolute
equality of condition; pure Communism is the logical deduction from the
imperfect form of the new society, which is generally differentiated from
it as Socialism.
Meantime, it is this simplicity and directness of the growing contest
which above all things presents itself as a terror to the conservative
instinct of the present day. Many among the middle class who are
sincerely grieved and shocked at the condition of the proletariat which
civilization has created, and even alarmed by the frightful inequalities
which it fosters, do nevertheless shudder back from the idea of the class
struggle, and strive to shut their eyes to the fact that it is going on.
They try to think that peace is not only possible, but natural, between
the two classes, the very essence of whose existence is that each can
only thrive by what it manages to force the other to yield to it. They
propose to themselves the impossible problem of raising the inferior or
exploited classes into a position in which they will cease to struggle
against the superior classes, while the latter will not cease to exploit
them. This absurd position drives them into the concoction of schemes
for bettering the condition of the working classes at their own expense,
some of them futile, some merely fantastic; or they may be divided again
into those which point out the advantages and pleasures of involuntary
asceticism, and reactionary plans for importing the conditions of the
production and life of the Middle Ages (wholly misunderstood by them, by
the way) into the present system of the capitalist farmer, the great
industries, and the universal world-market. Some see a solution of the
social problem in sham co-operation, which is merely an improved form of
joint-stockery: others preach thrift to (precarious) incomes of eighteen
shillings a week, and industry to men killing themselves by inches in
working overtime, or to men whom the labour-market has rejected as not
wanted: others beg the proletarians not to breed so fast; an injunction
the compliance with which might be at first of advantage to the
proletarians themselves in their present condition, but would certainly
undo the capitalists, if it were carried to any lengths, and would lead
through ruin and misery to the violent outbreak of the very revolution
which these timid people are so anxious to forego.
Then there are others who, looking back on the past, and perceiving that
the workmen of the Middle Ages lived in more comfort and self-respect
than ours do, even though they were subjected to the class rule of men
who were looked on as another order of beings than they, think that if
those conditions of life could be reproduced under our better political
conditions the question would be solved for a time at least. Their
schemes may be summed up in attempts, more or less preposterously futile,
to graft a class of independent peasants on our system of wages and
capital. They do not understand that this system of independent workmen,
producing almost entirely for the consumption of themselves and their
neighbours, and exploited by the upper classes by obvious taxes on their
labour, which was not otherwise organized or interfered with by the
exploiters, was what in past times took the place of our system, in which
the workers sell their labour in the competitive market to masters who
have in their hands the whole organization of the markets, and that these
two systems are mutually destructive.
Others again believe in the possibility of starting from our present
workhouse system, for the raising of the lowest part of the working
population into a better condition, but do not trouble themselves as to
the position of the workers who are fairly above the condition of
pauperism, or consider what part they will play in the contest for a
better livelihood. And, lastly, quite a large number of well-intentioned
persons belonging to the richer classes believe, that in a society that
compels competition for livelihood, and holds out to the workers as a
stimulus to exertion the hope of their rising into a monopolist class of
non-producers, it is yet possible to “moralize” capital (to use a slang
phrase of the Positivists): that is to say, that a sentiment imported
from a religion which looks upon another world as the true sphere of
action for mankind, will override the necessities of our daily life in
this world. This curious hope is founded on the feeling that a sentiment
antagonistic to the full development of commercialism exists and is
gaining ground, and that this sentiment is an independent growth of the
ethics of the present epoch. As a matter of fact, admitting its
existence, as I think we must do, it is the birth of the sense of
insecurity which is the shadow cast before by the approaching dissolution
of modern society founded on wage-slavery.
The greater part of these schemes aim, though seldom with the
consciousness of their promoters, at the creation of a new middle-class
out of the wage-earning class, and at their expense, just as the present
middle-class was developed out of the serf-population of the early Middle
Ages. It may be possible that such a _further_ development of the
middle-class lies before us, but it will not be brought about by any such
artificial means as the abovementioned schemes. If it comes at all, it
must be produced by events, which at present we cannot foresee, acting on
our commercial system, and revivifying for a little time, maybe, that
Capitalist Society which now seems sickening towards its end.
For what is visible before us in these days is the competitive commercial
system killing itself by its own force: profits lessening, businesses
growing bigger and bigger, the small employer of labour thrust out of his
function, and the aggregation of capital increasing the numbers of the
lower middle-class from above rather than from below, by driving the
smaller manufacturer into the position of a mere servant to the bigger.
The productivity of labour also increasing out of all proportion to the
capacity of the capitalists to manage the market or deal with the labour
supply: lack of employment therefore becoming chronic, and discontent
therewithal.
All this on the one hand. On the other, the workmen claiming everywhere
political equality, which cannot long be denied; and education spreading,
so that what between the improvement in the education of the
working-class and the continued amazing fatuity of that of the upper
classes, there is a distinct tendency to equalization here; and, as I
have hinted above, all history shows us what a danger to society may be a
class at once educated and socially degraded: though, indeed, no history
has yet shown us—what is swiftly advancing upon us—a class which, though
it shall have attained knowledge, shall lack utterly the refinement and
self-respect which come from the union of knowledge with leisure and ease
of life. The growth of such a class may well make the “cultured” people
of to-day tremble.
Whatever, therefore, of unforeseen and unconceived-of may lie in the womb
of the future, there is nothing visible before us but a decaying system,
with no outlook but ever-increasing entanglement and blindness, and a new
system, Socialism, the hope of which is ever growing clearer in men’s
minds—a system which not only sees how labour can be freed from its
present fetters, and organized unwastefully, so as to produce the
greatest possible amount of wealth for the community and for every member
of it, but which bears with it its own ethics and religion and æsthetics:
that is the hope and promise of a new and higher life in all ways. So
that even if those unforeseen economical events above spoken of were to
happen, and put off for a while the end of our Capitalist system, the
latter would drag itself along as an anomaly cursed by all, a mere clog
on the aspirations of humanity.
It is not likely that it will come to that: in all probability the
logical outcome of the latter days of Capitalism will go step by step
with its actual history: while all men, even its declared enemies, will
be working to bring Socialism about, the aims of those who have learned
to believe in the certainty and beneficence of its advent will become
clearer, their methods for realizing it clearer also, and at last ready
to hand. Then will come that open acknowledgment for the necessity of
the change (an acknowledgment coming from the intelligence of
civilization) which is commonly called Revolution. It is no use
prophesying as to the events which will accompany that revolution, but to
a reasonable man it seems unlikely to the last degree, or we will say
impossible, that a moral sentiment will induce the proprietary
classes—those who live by _owning_ the means of production which the
unprivileged classes must needs _use_—to yield up this privilege
uncompelled; all one can hope is that they will see the implicit threat
of compulsion in the events of the day, and so yield with a good grace to
the terrible necessity of forming part of a world in which all, including
themselves, will work honestly and live easily.