In Europe there is but one country that still suffers the despotism of
an aristocracy, and that country is Russia. The modern ideas, the modern
social ideas, have taken all this time to pass from France, Germany,
and England into Russia, and have seized on what, for lack of a better
word, I might call, its nascent middle-class. The results have been, and
still are, wonderful and terrible. A group of men (for they are little
more) has suddenly realised that the immense mass of the People is being
despotised over in the interest of a group in reality little larger than
itself. All, I will not say freedom, but possibilities of freedom are
resolutely withheld. Russia at present has not the guaranteed protection
of its men’s and women’s liberties which the English of the fourteenth,
the thirteenth, the twelfth, the eleventh, the tenth centuries had!
This to-day is a state of things which cannot continue. The group of
men who see and feel this, not clearly and quietly as we outsiders can,
but intensely and passionately, is waging a duel to the death with the
other group, with the despotism, for the bare principles of freedom.
On the one hand are knowledge and light, on the other ignorance and
darkness, the modern against the ancient spirit. But, thanks to the
fact that there are men whose whole interest is to resist the one and
support the other to the last, the light has become lightning and not
only irradiates but strikes. It is considered by some a question whether
this despotism, armed with all resources of wealth and military power,
will be able to stamp out this group before the immense mass of the
People is awakened to the meaning of it all. Others, however, merely
consider whether the Russian government will be destroyed by a revolution
or constitutionalized by a reform. We English, you see, consider it all
clearly and quietly as mere outsiders, and so, as regards the _aspect_ of
the problem, we are; but not, not as regards the problem itself! These
modern ideas, these social ideas, are working not only in Russia, where
the abuses which surround them make them burn so fiercely, but more or
less all over Europe, and in England rather more than less. Ireland,
we all see, smoulders with them. And why, pray? Because England and
Ireland are always snarling at one another, “it being their nature to?”
Not so. It is because that aspect of the problem which is presented to
Great Britain generally is a little more pressing in Ireland than in
England or Scotland. The trouble in Ireland is not national but social.
The strife is not between Irish and English: it is between peasants and
landlords. Unhappily many landlords are English: unhappily many peasants
believe that the English as a nation support the landlords as a class.
Hence whatever Irish hatred of England there may be; but the trouble is
not, I repeat, national, it is social. It is the People rising against
the Middle-class.
Well, this movement, whether it be in Russia, in England, in Germany,
in France, in America, we are all pretty well agreed to call the
Socialistic movement. It represents the effort of the People after social
improvement. It took its rise not from _within_ the people, but from
_without_. The French, English, and German Socialists were originally
groups of men who suddenly realized that the immense mass of the People
was being despotized over in the interest of the Middle-class. Each
country has its peculiar aspect of this fact, but the fact is the same
in each. In France the Middle-class made and supported the Empire, and,
having stamped out the People’s wild attempt at power in ’71, made and
supports the Republic. In Germany—dismembered Germany—the problem was
pushed back before the apparently greater one of national unity, but now
it arises again and demands solution. In England the landed proprietors,
and still more the capitalists, are beginning to have qualms; but the
real struggle does not lie between them and the Socialists: they are but
overgrown individuals of a class. There will be no more Tories and no
more Conservatives: the future lies in the struggle between Liberals and
Socialists, the Middle-class and the People.
This Socialistic movement, then, took its rise not from _within_ the
People but from _without_, and not in connection with Religion, the
great ally of the powers that were, the Middle-class, but on the whole
antagonistic to it. This movement took its rise in men of intellect who
had little or no care for Religion, and its tendency is intellectual and
careless of Religion. The Middle-class has shown nothing but dislike to
this movement: the Middle-class has understood enough of the ideas of
this movement to know that they are subversive of its own superiority.
As for the People, they have understood little or nothing. Socialists
tell them, what is indeed the truth, that they are the masters:
that to-morrow, if they pleased, they could send a parliament up to
Westminster that should dictate what terms they pleased to “their lords
and masters, the landowners and the capitalists.” The People does not
happily believe it. They are so hopeless: they have been deceived so
often by those who said they would help them. (Bill here, you see, with
a wife and six children, all living in a den that the Zoological people
would consider unfit for a hyena—Bill cannot be made to understand how
the question comes home to _him_!) Besides which, let us say it at once
and insist upon it, the People is the most long-suffering of all things:
it desires to despoil no man, it only desires the happiness which mere
food, clothing, and a house will give it.
In this state of affairs—the powerlessness of the Socialists to bring
home to the People the great idea of social improvement—lie the causes of
the religious movement whose best-known and best representative is the
Salvation Army.