II.
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.