Produced by Adrian Mastronardi and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
* * * * *
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has |
| been preserved. |
| |
| Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For |
| a complete list, please see the end of this document. |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
* * * * *
25 CENTS
SOCIALISM
UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC
_By Frederick Engels_
[Illustration: _Labor_]
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
_Publishers CHICAGO_
PRINTED IN U.S.A.
SOCIALISM
UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC
BY
FREDERICK ENGELS
_TRANSLATED BY EDWARD AVELING_
_D.Sc., Fellow of University College, London_
WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific needs no preface. It ranks with the
Communist Manifesto as one of the indispensable books for any one
desiring to understand the modern socialist movement. It has been
translated into every language where capitalism prevails, and its
circulation is more rapid than ever before.
In 1900, when our publishing house had just begun the circulation of
socialist books, we brought out the first American reprint of the
authorized translation of this work. The many editions required by the
growing demand have worn out the plates, and we are now reprinting it
in more attractive form.
It will be observed that the author in his introduction says that from
1883 to 1892, 20,000 copies of the book were sold in Germany. Our own
sales of the book in America from 1900 to 1908 were not less than
30,000.
Last year we published the first English version of the larger work to
which the author refers in the opening page of his introduction. The
translation is by Austin Lewis, and bears the title "Landmarks of
Scientific Socialism" (cloth, $1.00). It includes the greater portion
of the original work, omitting what is presented here, and also some
of the personalities due to the heat of controversy.
Frederick Engels is second only to Karl Marx among socialist writers,
and his influence in the United States is only beginning.
C.H.K.
June, 1908.
INTRODUCTION
The present little book is, originally, a part of a larger whole.
About 1875, Dr. E. Duehring, _privatdocent_ at Berlin University,
suddenly and rather clamorously announced his conversion to Socialism,
and presented the German public not only with an elaborate Socialist
theory, but also with a complete practical plan for the reorganization
of society. As a matter of course, he fell foul of his predecessors;
above all, he honored Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of
his wrath.
This took place about the time when the two sections of the Socialist
party in Germany--Eisenachers and Lassallians--had just effected their
fusion, and thus obtained not only an immense increase of strength,
but, what was more, the faculty of employing the whole of this
strength against the common enemy. The Socialist party in Germany was
fast becoming a power. But to make it a power, the first condition was
that the newly-conquered unity should not be imperiled. And Dr.
Duehring openly proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus
of a future separate party. It thus became necessary to take up the
gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight out the struggle whether we
liked it or not.
This, however, though it might not be an over difficult, was evidently
a long-winded, business. As is well known, we Germans are of a
terribly ponderous _Gruendlichkeit_, radical profundity or profound
radicality, whatever you may like to call it. Whenever anyone of us
expounds what he considers a new doctrine, he has first to elaborate
it into an all-comprising system. He has to prove that both the first
principles of logic and the fundamental laws of the universe had
existed from all eternity for no other purpose than to ultimately lead
to this newly-discovered, crowning theory. And Dr. Duehring, in this
respect, was quite up to the national mark. Nothing less than a
complete "System of Philosophy," mental, moral, natural, and
historical; a complete "System of Political Economy and Socialism";
and, finally, a "Critical History of Political Economy"--three big
volumes in octavo, heavy extrinsically and intrinsically, three
army-corps of arguments mobilized against all previous philosophers
and economists in general, and against Marx in particular--in fact, an
attempt at a complete "revolution in science"--these were what I
should have to tackle. I had to treat of all and every possible
subject, from the concepts of time and space to Bimetallism; from the
eternity of matter and motion to the perishable nature of moral
ideas; from Darwin's natural selection to the education of youth in a
future society. Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my
opponent gave me the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him,
and in a more connected form than had previously been done, the views
held by Marx and myself on this great variety of subjects. And that
was the principal reason which made me undertake this otherwise
ungrateful task.
My reply was first published in a series of articles in the Leipzig
"Vorwaerts," the chief organ of the Socialist party, and later on as a
book: "Herrn Eugen Duehring's Umwaelzung der Wissenschaft" (Mr. E.
Duehring's "Revolution in Science"), a second edition of which appeared
in Zuerich, 1886.
At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now representative of
Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three chapters of
this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880,
under the title: "_Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique_."
From this French text a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In
1883, our German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original
language. Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Roumanian translations,
based upon the German text, have since been published. Thus, with the
present English edition, this little book circulates in ten
languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our
"Communist Manifesto" of 1848 or Marx's "Capital," has been so often
translated. In Germany it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies
in all.
The economic terms used in this work, as far as they are new, agree
with those used in the English edition of Marx's "Capital." We call
"production of commodities" that economic phase where articles are
produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for purposes
of exchange; that is, as _commodities_, not as use-values. This phase
extends from the first beginnings of production for exchange down to
our present time; it attains its full development under capitalist
production only, that is, under conditions where the capitalist, the
owner of the means of production, employs, for wages, laborers, people
deprived of all means of production except their own labor-power, and
pockets the excess of the selling price of the products over his
outlay. We divide the history of industrial production since the
Middle Ages into three periods: (1) handicraft, small master craftsmen
with a few journeymen and apprentices, where each laborer produces the
complete article; (2) manufacture, where greater numbers of workmen,
grouped in one large establishment, produce the complete article on
the principle of division of labor, each workman performing only one
partial operation, so that the product is complete only after having
passed successively through the hands of all; (3) modern industry,
where the product is produced by machinery driven by power, and where
the work of the laborer is limited to superintending and correcting
the performances of the mechanical agent.
I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet with
objection from a considerable portion of the British public. But if we
Continentals had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of
British "respectability," we should be even worse off than we are.
This book defends what we call "historical materialism," and the word
materialism grates upon the ears of the immense majority of British
readers. "Agnosticism" might be tolerated, but materialism is utterly
inadmissible.
And yet the original home of all modern materialism, from the
seventeenth century onwards, is England.
"Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain. Already the
British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, 'whether it was impossible for
matter to think?'
"In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence,
_i.e._, he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a
nominalist. Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly
found among the English schoolmen.
"The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon. To him natural
philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon the
experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy.
Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae, Democritus and his atoms, he often
quotes as his authorities. According to him the senses are infallible
and the source of all knowledge. All science is based on experience,
and consists in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a
rational method of investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison,
observation, experiment, are the principal forms of such a rational
method. Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first
and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical
motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vital spirit, a
tension--or a 'qual,' to use a term of Jacob Boehme's[A]--of matter.
"In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still occludes within itself
the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, matter,
surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamour, seems to attract man's whole
entity by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated
doctrine pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology.
"In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is
the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon
the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract
experience of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed as the queen
of sciences. Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome
its opponent, misanthropic, fleshless spiritualism, and that on the
latter's own ground, materialism has to chastise its own flesh and
turn ascetic. Thus, from a sensual, it passes into an intellectual,
entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the consistency, regardless of
consequences, characteristic of the intellect.
"Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus: if all human knowledge
is furnished by the senses, then our concepts and ideas are but the
phantoms, divested of their sensual forms, of the real world.
Philosophy can but give names to these phantoms. One name may be
applied to more than one of them. There may even be names of names. It
would imply a contradiction if, on the one hand, we maintained that
all ideas had their origin in the world of sensation, and, on the
other, that a word was more than a word; that besides the beings known
to us by our senses, beings which are one and all individuals, there
existed also beings of a general, not individual, nature. An unbodily
substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body. Body, being,
substance, are but different terms for the same reality. _It is
impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks._ This matter
is the substratum of all changes going on in the world. The word
infinite is meaningless, unless it states that our mind is capable of
performing an endless process of addition. Only material things being
perceptible to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of God.
My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical
movement which has a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are
what we call good. Man is subject to the same laws as nature. Power
and freedom are identical.
"Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, furnishing a proof
for Bacon's fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge
from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on the
Human Understanding, supplied this proof.
"Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism;
Collins, Dodwall, Coward, Hartley, Priestley similarly shattered the
last theological bars that still hemmed-in Locke's sensationalism. At
all events, for practical materialists, Theism is but an easy-going
way of getting rid of religion."[B]
Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism.
If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid
their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that
Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of
French materialists which made the eighteenth century, in spite of all
battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen,
a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French
Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as
in Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.
There is no denying it. About the middle of this century, what struck
every cultivated foreigner who set up his residence in England, was,
what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity
of the English respectable middle-class. We, at that time, were all
materialists, or, at least, very advanced freethinkers, and to us it
appeared inconceivable that almost all educated people in England
should believe in all sorts of impossible miracles, and that even
geologists like Buckland and Mantell should contort the facts of their
science so as not to clash too much with the myths of the book of
Genesis; while, in order to find people who dared to use their own
intellectual faculties with regard to religious matters, you had to go
amongst the uneducated, the "great unwashed," as they were then
called, the working people, especially the Owenite Socialists.
But England has been "civilized" since then. The exhibition of 1851
sounded the knell of English insular exclusiveness. England became
gradually internationalized, in diet, in manners, in ideas; so much so
that I begin to wish that some English manners and customs had made as
much headway on the Continent as other continental habits have made
here. Anyhow, the introduction and spread of salad-oil (before 1851
known only to the aristocracy) has been accompanied by a fatal spread
of continental scepticism in matters religious, and it has come to
this, that agnosticism, though not yet considered "the thing" quite as
much as the Church of England, is yet very nearly on a par, as far as
respectability goes, with Baptism, and decidedly ranks above the
Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing that under these
circumstances it will be consoling to many who sincerely regret and
condemn this progress of infidelity, to learn that these "new-fangled
notions" are not of foreign origin, are not "made in Germany," like so
many other articles of daily use, but are undoubtedly Old English, and
that their British originators two hundred years ago went a good deal
further than their descendants now dare to venture.
What, indeed, is agnosticism, but, to use an expressive Lancashire
term, "shamefaced" materialism? The agnostic's conception of Nature is
materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law,
and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without. But,
he adds, we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the
existence of some Supreme Being beyond the known universe. Now, this
might hold good at the time when Laplace, to Napoleon's question, why
in the great astronomer's _Mecanique celeste_ the Creator was not even
mentioned, proudly replied: _Je n'avais pas besoin de cette
hypothese_. But nowadays, in our evolutionary conception of the
universe, there is absolutely no room for either a Creator or a Ruler;
and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out from the whole existing world,
implies a contradiction in terms, and, as it seems to me, a gratuitous
insult to the feelings of religious people.
Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon the
information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know
that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we
perceive through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever he
speaks of objects or their qualities, he does in reality not mean
these objects and qualities, of which he cannot know anything for
certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on his
senses. Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by
mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation, there was
action. _Im Anfang war die That._ And human action had solved the
difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the
pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use
these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put
to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our
sense-perceptions. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our
estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be
wrong, and our attempt must fail. But if we succeed in accomplishing
our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it,
and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is positive
proof that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, _so far_, agree
with reality outside ourselves. And whenever we find ourselves face to
face with a failure, then we generally are not long in making out the
cause that made us fail; we find that the perception upon which we
acted was either incomplete and superficial, or combined with the
results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by them--what we
call defective reasoning. So long as we take care to train and to use
our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits
prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long we
shall find that the result of our action proves the conformity of our
perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in
one single instance, so far, have we been led to the conclusion that
our sense-perceptions, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds
ideas respecting the outer world that are, by their very nature, at
variance with reality, or that there is an inherent incompatibility
between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.
But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may correctly
perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or
mental process grasp the thing in itself. This "thing in itself" is
beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know
all the qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing
remains but the fact that the said thing exists without us; and when
your senses have taught you that fact, you have grasped the last
remnant of the thing in itself, Kant's celebrated unknowable _Ding an
sich_. To which it may be added, that in Kant's time our knowledge of
natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he might well suspect,
behind the little we knew about each of them, a mysterious "thing in
itself." But one after another these ungraspable things have been
grasped, analyzed, and, what is more, _reproduced_ by the giant
progress of science; and what we can produce, we certainly cannot
consider as unknowable. To the chemistry of the first half of this
century organic substances were such mysterious objects; now, we learn
to build them up one after another from their chemical elements
without the aid of organic processes. Modern chemists declare that as
soon as the chemical constitution of no matter what body is known, it
can be built up from its elements. We are still far from knowing the
constitution of the highest organic substances, the albuminous bodies;
but there is no reason why we should not, if only after centuries,
arrive at that knowledge and, armed with it, produce artificial
albumen. But if we arrive at that, we shall at the same time have
produced organic life, for life, from its lowest to its highest forms,
is but the normal mode of existence of albuminous bodies.
As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal mental
reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom
is. He may say that, as far as _we_ know, matter and motion, or as it
is now called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that
we have no proof of their not having been created at some time or
other. But if you try to use this admission against him in any
particular case, he will quickly put you out of court. If he admits
the possibility of spiritualism _in abstracto_, he will have none of
it _in concreto_. As far as we know and can know, he will tell you
there is no Creator and no Ruler of the universe; as far as we are
concerned, matter and energy can neither be created nor annihilated;
for us, mind is a mode of energy, a function of the brain; all we know
is that the material world is governed by immutable laws, and so
forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he _knows_
anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about
which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and
calls it agnosticism.
At all events, one thing seems clear: even if I was an agnostic, it is
evident that I could not describe the conception of history sketched
out in this little book, as "historical agnosticism." Religious people
would laugh at me, agnostics would indignantly ask, was I going to
make fun of them? And thus I hope even British respectability will not
be overshocked if I use, in English as well as in so many other
languages, the term, "historical materialism," to designate that view
of the course of history, which seeks the ultimate cause and the great
moving power of all important historic events in the economic
development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and
exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes,
and in the struggles of these classes against one another.
This indulgence will perhaps be accorded to me all the sooner if I
show that historical materialism may be of advantage even to British
respectability. I have mentioned the fact, that about forty or fifty
years ago, any cultivated foreigner settling in England was struck by
what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity
of the English respectable middle-class. I am now going to prove that
the respectable English middle-class of that time was not quite as
stupid as it looked to the intelligent foreigner. Its religious
leanings can be explained.
When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle-class of
the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had conquered a
recognized position within mediaeval feudal organization, but this
position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The
development of the middle-class, the _bourgeoisie_, became
incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal
system, therefore, had to fall.
But the great international center of feudalism was the Roman Catholic
Church. It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in spite of
all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to
the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedian countries. It surrounded
feudal institutions with the halo of divine consecration. It had
organized its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was
itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully
one-third of the soil of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism
could be successively attacked in each country and in detail, this,
its sacred central organization, had to be destroyed.
Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on the great
revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy,
physiology, were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the
development of its industrial production, required a science which
ascertained the physical properties of natural objects and the modes
of action of the forces of Nature. Now up to then science had but been
the humble handmaid of the Church, had not been allowed to overstep
the limits set by faith, and for that reason had been no science at
all. Science rebelled against the Church; the bourgeoisie could not do
without science, and, therefore, had to join in the rebellion.
The above, though touching but two of the points where the rising
middle-class was bound to come into collision with the established
religion, will be sufficient to show, first, that the class most
directly interested in the struggle against the pretensions of the
Roman Church was the bourgeoisie; and second, that every struggle
against feudalism, at that time, had to take on a religious disguise,
had to be directed against the Church in the first instance. But if
the universities and the traders of the cities started the cry, it was
sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the masses of the country
people, the peasants, who everywhere had to struggle for their very
existence with their feudal lords, spiritual and temporal.
The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated in
three great, decisive battles.
The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in Germany.
The war-cry raised against the Church by Luther was responded to by
two insurrections of a political nature: first, that of the lower
nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants'
War, 1525. Both were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the
indecision of the parties most interested, the burghers of the
towns--an indecision into the causes of which we cannot here enter.
From that moment the struggle degenerated into a fight between the
local princes and the central power, and ended by blotting out
Germany, for two hundred years, from the politically active nations of
Europe. The Lutheran reformation produced a new creed indeed, a
religion adapted to absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasants of
North-east Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from
freemen reduced to serfs.
But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin's creed was one
fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination
doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the
commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend
upon a man's activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances
uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that
runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers: and
this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all
old commercial routes and centers were replaced by new ones, when
India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most
sacred economic articles of faith--the value of gold and silver--began
to totter and to break down. Calvin's church constitution was
thoroughly democratic and republican; and where the kingdom of God was
republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to
monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a
willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in
Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all,
Scotland.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine
ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The
middle-class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the
country districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in all the three
great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to
do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory
once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of
that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell, the yeomanry of England
had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been for that yeomanry and
for the _plebeian_ element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would
never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never
have brought Charles I. to the scaffold. In order to secure even those
conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the
time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further--exactly
as in 1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems, in fact, to be
one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society.
Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily
followed the inevitable reaction which in its turn went beyond the
point where it might have maintained itself. After a series of
oscillations, the new center of gravity was at last attained and
became a new starting-point. The grand period of English history,
known to respectability under the name of "the Great Rebellion," and
the struggles succeeding it, were brought to a close by the
comparatively puny event entitled by Liberal historians, "the Glorious
Revolution."
The new starting-point was a compromise between the rising
middle-class and the ex-feudal landowners. The latter, though called,
as now, the aristocracy, had been long since on the way which led them
to become what Louis Philippe in France became at a much later period,
"the first bourgeois of the kingdom." Fortunately for England, the old
feudal barons had killed one another during the Wars of the Roses.
Their successors, though mostly scions of the old families, had been
so much out of the direct line of descent that they constituted quite
a new body, with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois than feudal.
They fully understood the value of money, and at once began to
increase their rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and
replacing them by sheep. Henry VIII., while squandering the Church
lands, created fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable
confiscations of estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts,
and continued during the whole of the seventeenth century, had the
same result. Consequently, ever since Henry VII., the English
"aristocracy," far from counteracting the development of industrial
production, had, on the contrary, sought to indirectly profit thereby;
and there had always been a section of the great landowners willing,
from economical or political reasons, to co-operate with the leading
men of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie. The compromise of
1689 was, therefore, easily accomplished. The political spoils of
"pelf and place" were left to the great land-owning families, provided
the economic interests of the financial, manufacturing, and commercial
middle-class were sufficiently attended to. And these economic
interests were at that time powerful enough to determine the general
policy of the nation. There might be squabbles about matters of
detail, but, on the whole, the aristocratic oligarchy knew too well
that its own economic prosperity was irretrievably bound up with that
of the industrial and commercial middle-class.
From that time, the bourgeoisie was a humble, but still a recognized
component of the ruling classes of England. With the rest of them, it
had a common interest in keeping in subjection the great working mass
of the nation. The merchant or manufacturer himself stood in the
position of master, or, as it was until lately called, of "natural
superior" to his clerks, his workpeople, his domestic servants. His
interest was to get as much and as good work out of them as he could;
for this end they had to be trained to proper submission. He was
himself religious; his religion had supplied the standard under which
he had fought the king and the lords; he was not long in discovering
the opportunities this same religion offered him for working upon the
minds of his natural inferiors, and making them submissive to the
behests of the masters it had pleased God to place over them. In
short, the English bourgeoisie now had to take a part in keeping down
the "lower orders," the great producing mass of the nation, and one of
the means employed for that purpose was the influence of religion.
There was another fact that contributed to strengthen the religious
leanings of the bourgeoisie. That was the rise of materialism in
England. This new doctrine not only shocked the pious feelings of the
middle-class; it announced itself as a philosophy only fit for
scholars and cultivated men of the world, in contrast to religion
which was good enough for the uneducated masses, including the
bourgeoisie. With Hobbes it stepped on the stage as a defender of
royal prerogative and omnipotence; it called upon absolute monarchy to
keep down that _puer robustus sed malitiosus_, to wit, the people.
Similarly, with the successors of Hobbes, with Bolingbroke,
Shaftesbury, etc., the new deistic form of materialism remained an
aristocratic, esoteric doctrine, and, therefore, hateful to the
middle-class both for its religious heresy and for its anti-bourgeois
political connections. Accordingly, in opposition to the materialism
and deism of the aristocracy, those Protestant sects which had
furnished the flag and the fighting contingent against the Stuarts,
continued to furnish the main strength of the progressive
middle-class, and form even to-day the backbone of "the Great Liberal
Party."
In the meantime materialism passed from England to France, where it
met and coalesced with another materialistic school of philosophers, a
branch of Cartesianism. In France, too, it remained at first an
exclusively aristocratic doctrine. But soon its revolutionary
character asserted itself. The French materialists did not limit their
criticism to matters of religious belief; they extended it to whatever
scientific tradition or political institution they met with; and to
prove the claim of their doctrine to universal application, they took
the shortest cut, and boldly applied it to all subjects of knowledge
in the giant work after which they were named--the _Encyclopedie_.
Thus, in one or the other of its two forms--avowed materialism or
deism--it became the creed of the whole cultured youth of France; so
much so that, when the great Revolution broke out, the doctrine
hatched by English Royalists gave a theoretical flag to French
Republicans and Terrorists, and furnished the text for the Declaration
of the Rights of Man. The great French Revolution was the third
uprising of the bourgeoisie, but the first that had entirely cast off
the religious cloak, and was fought out on undisguised political
lines; it was the first, too, that was really fought out to the
destruction of one of the combatants, the aristocracy, and the
complete triumph of the other, the bourgeoisie. In England the
continuity of pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary institutions,
and the compromise between landlords and capitalists, found its
expression in the continuity of judicial precedents and in the
religious preservation of the feudal forms of the law. In France the
Revolution constituted a complete breach with the traditions of the
past; it cleared out the very last vestiges of feudalism, and created
in the _Code Civil_ a masterly adaptation of the old Roman law--that
almost perfect expression of the juridical relations corresponding to
the economic stage called by Marx the production of commodities--to
modern capitalistic conditions; so masterly that this French
revolutionary code still serves as a model for reforms of the law of
property in all other countries, not excepting England. Let us,
however, not forget that if English law continues to express the
economic relations of capitalistic society in that barbarous feudal
language which corresponds to the thing expressed, just as English
spelling corresponds to English pronunciation--_vous ecrivez Londres
et vous prononcez Constantinople_, said a Frenchman--that same English
law is the only one which has preserved through ages, and transmitted
to America and the Colonies the best part of that old Germanic
personal freedom, local self-government, and independence from all
interference but that of the law courts, which on the Continent has
been lost during the period of absolute monarchy, and has nowhere been
as yet fully recovered.
To return to our British bourgeois. The French Revolution gave him a
splendid opportunity, with the help of the Continental monarchies, to
destroy French maritime commerce, to annex French colonies, and to
crush the last French pretensions to maritime rivalry. That was one
reason why he fought it. Another was that the ways of this revolution
went very much against his grain. Not only its "execrable" terrorism,
but the very attempt to carry bourgeois rule to extremes. What should
the British bourgeois do without his aristocracy, that taught him
manners, such as they were, and invented fashions for him--that
furnished officers for the army, which kept order at home, and the
navy, which conquered colonial possessions and new markets abroad?
There was indeed a progressive minority of the bourgeoisie, that
minority whose interests were not so well attended to under the
compromise; this section, composed chiefly of the less wealthy
middle-class, did sympathize with the Revolution, but it was powerless
in Parliament.
Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French Revolution, the
God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his religion. Had
not the reign of terror in Paris proved what was the upshot, if the
religious instincts of the masses were lost? The more materialism
spread from France to neighboring countries, and was reinforced by
similar doctrinal currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in
fact, materialism and freethought generally became, on the Continent,
the necessary qualifications of a cultivated man, the more stubbornly
the English middle-class stuck to its manifold religious creeds. These
creeds might differ from one another, but they were, all of them,
distinctly religious, Christian creeds.
While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the bourgeoisie
in France, in England Watt, Arkwright, Cartwright, and others,
initiated an industrial revolution, which completely shifted the
center of gravity of economic power. The wealth of the bourgeoisie
increased considerably faster than that of the landed aristocracy.
Within the bourgeoisie itself, the financial aristocracy, the bankers,
etc., were more and more pushed into the background by the
manufacturers. The compromise of 1689, even after the gradual changes
it had undergone in favor of the bourgeoisie, no longer corresponded
to the relative position of the parties to it. The character of these
parties, too, had changed; the bourgeoisie of 1830 was very different
from that of the preceding century. The political power still left to
the aristocracy, and used by them to resist the pretensions of the new
industrial bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the new economic
interests. A fresh struggle with the aristocracy was necessary; it
could end only in a victory of the new economic power. First, the
Reform Act was pushed through, in spite of all resistance, under the
impulse of the French Revolution of 1830. It gave to the bourgeoisie a
recognized and powerful place in Parliament. Then the Repeal of the
Corn Laws, which settled, once for all, the supremacy of the
bourgeoisie, and especially of its most active portion, the
manufacturers, over the landed aristocracy. This was the greatest
victory of the bourgeoisie; it was, however, also the last it gained
in its own, exclusive interest. Whatever triumphs it obtained later
on, it had to share with a new social power, first its ally, but soon
its rival.
The industrial revolution had created a class of large manufacturing
capitalists, but also a class--and a far more numerous one--of
manufacturing work-people. This class gradually increased in numbers,
in proportion as the industrial revolution seized upon one branch of
manufacture after another, and in the same proportion it increased in
power. This power it proved as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant
Parliament to repeal the acts forbidding combinations of workmen.
During the Reform agitation, the working-men constituted the Radical
wing of the Reform party; the Act of 1832 having excluded them from
the suffrage, they formulated their demands in the People's Charter,
and constituted themselves, in opposition to the great bourgeois
Anti-Corn Law party, into an independent party, the Chartists, the
first working-men's party of modern times.
Then came the Continental revolutions of February and March, 1848, in
which the working people played such a prominent part, and, at least
in Paris, put forward demands which were certainly inadmissible from
the point of view of capitalistic society. And then came the general
reaction. First the defeat of the Chartists on the 10th April, 1848,
then the crushing of the Paris working-men's insurrection in June of
the same year, then the disasters of 1849 in Italy, Hungary, South
Germany, and at last the victory of Louis Bonaparte over Paris, 2nd
December, 1851. For a time, at least, the bugbear of working-class
pretensions was put down, but at what cost! If the British bourgeois
had been convinced before of the necessity of maintaining the common
people in a religious mood, how much more must he feel that necessity
after all these experiences? Regardless of the sneers of his
Continental compeers, he continued to spend thousands and tens of
thousands, year after year, upon the evangelization of the lower
orders; not content with his own native religious machinery, he
appealed to Brother Jonathan, the greatest organizer in existence of
religion as a trade, and imported from America revivalism, Moody and
Sankey, and the like; and, finally, he accepted the dangerous aid of
the Salvation Army, which revives the propaganda of early
Christianity, appeals to the poor as the elect, fights capitalism in a
religious way, and thus fosters an element of early Christian class
antagonism, which one day may become troublesome to the well-to-do
people who now find the ready money for it.
It seems a law of historical development that the bourgeoisie can in
no European country get hold of political power--at least for any
length of time--in the same exclusive way in which the feudal
aristocracy kept hold of it during the Middle Ages. Even in France,
where feudalism was completely extinguished, the bourgeoisie, as a
whole, has held full possession of the Government for very short
periods only. During Louis Philippe's reign, 1830-48, a very small
portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the kingdom; by far the larger part
were excluded from the suffrage by the high qualification. Under the
second Republic, 1848-51, the whole bourgeoisie ruled, but for three
years only; their incapacity brought on the second Empire. It is only
now, in the third Republic, that the bourgeoisie as a whole have kept
possession of the helm for more than twenty years; and they are
already showing lively signs of decadence. A durable reign of the
bourgeoisie has been possible only in countries like America, where
feudalism was unknown, and society at the very beginning started from
a bourgeois basis. And even in France and America, the successors of
the bourgeoisie, the working people, are already knocking at the door.
In England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway. Even the
victory of 1832 left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive
possession of all the leading Government offices. The meekness with
which the wealthy middle-class submitted to this, remained
inconceivable to me until the great Liberal manufacturer, Mr. W.A.
Forster, in a public speech implored the young men of Bradford to
learn French, as a means to get on in the world, and quoted from his
own experience how sheepish he looked when, as a Cabinet Minister, he
had to move in society where French was, at least, as necessary as
English! The fact was, the English middle-class of that time were, as
a rule, quite uneducated upstarts, and could not help leaving to the
aristocracy those superior Government places where other
qualifications were required than mere insular narrowness and insular
conceit, seasoned by business sharpness.[C] Even now the endless
newspaper debates about middle-class education show that the English
middle-class does not yet consider itself good enough for the best
education, and looks to something more modest. Thus, even after the
Repeal of the Corn Laws, it appeared a matter of course, that the men
who had carried the day, the Cobdens, Brights, Forsters, etc., should
remain excluded from a share in the official government of the
country, until twenty years afterwards, a new Reform Act opened to
them the door of the Cabinet. The English bourgeoisie are, up to the
present day, so deeply penetrated by a sense of their social
inferiority that they keep up, at their own expense and that of the
nation, an ornamental caste of drones to represent the nation worthily
at all State functions; and they consider themselves highly honored
whenever one of themselves is found worthy of admission into this
select and privileged body, manufactured, after all, by themselves.
The industrial and commercial middle-class had, therefore, not yet
succeeded in driving the landed aristocracy completely from political
power when another competitor, the working-class, appeared on the
stage. The reaction after the Chartist movement and the Continental
revolutions, as well as the unparalleled extension of English trade
from 1848-1866, (ascribed vulgarly to Free Trade alone, but due far
more to the colossal development of railways, ocean steamers, and
means of intercourse generally), had again driven the working-class
into the dependency of the Liberal party, of which they formed, as in
pre-Chartist times, the Radical wing. Their claims to the franchise,
however, gradually became irresistible; while the Whig leaders of the
Liberals "funked," Disraeli showed his superiority by making the
Tories seize the favorable moment and introduce household suffrage in
the boroughs, along with a redistribution of seats. Then followed the
ballot; then in 1884 the extension of household suffrage to the
counties and a fresh redistribution of seats, by which electoral
districts were to some extent equalized. All these measures
considerably increased the electoral power of the working-class, so
much so that in at least 150 to 200 constituencies that class now
furnishes the majority of voters. But parliamentary government is a
capital school for teaching respect for tradition; if the middle-class
look with awe and veneration upon what Lord John Manners playfully
called "our old nobility," the mass of the working-people then looked
up with respect and deference to what used to be designated as "their
betters," the middle-class. Indeed, the British workman, some fifteen
years ago, was the model workman, whose respectful regard for the
position of his master, and whose self-restraining modesty in claiming
rights for himself, consoled our German economists of the
_Katheder-Socialist_ school for the incurable communistic and
revolutionary tendencies of their own working-men at home.