The outburst of socialist agitation in England in 1883 and 1884 was immediately preceded by a revival of popular interest in an old and favourite subject of English speculation, the nationalization of the land. Mr. Henry George had published his "Progress and Poverty" in 1881, and in the same year the Democratic Federation was established in London with land nationalization for one of its principles, and Mr. A. R. Wallace, the eminent naturalist, founded the Land Nationalization Society. In 1882, Mr. Wallace contributed still further to awaken discussion of the question by publishing his work on "Land Nationalization," and the discussion was spread everywhere in 1883 by the appearance of a sixpenny edition of Mr. George's remarkable work. Land nationalization in the hands of Mr. Wallace has little in common with any form of contemporary socialism. He does not contemplate any interference with the present system of agricultural production; that is still to be conducted by capitalists and hired labourers, as it is now. He merely proposes to abolish what is called landlordism by the compulsory conversion of the present tenant farmers into a body of yeomanry or occupying owners, and his scheme differs from the more ordinary proposals for the creation of peasant proprietors merely in two points: 1st—which is a very good proposal—that he would leave part of the price of the property to be paid in the form of a permanent annual quitrent to the State; and 2nd—which is a more doubtful proposal—that this part should represent, as nearly as it is possible now to calculate it, the original value of the soil apart from improvements of any kind—or, in other words, the unearned part of the present value of the property—and that it should be subject to periodical revision, with a view to recovering from the holder any further unearned increments of value that may accrue to his holding from time to time. Mr. Wallace, like Mr. George, has very utopian expectations from his scheme; but he would honestly buy up the rights of the existing landlords, while Mr. George would merely confiscate them by exceptional taxation. This difference broke up the Land Nationalization Society in 1883, and the partisans of Mr. George's view seceded and formed themselves into the English Land Restoration League, which has established branches in most of the larger towns, and has now probably a more numerous membership than the original society. It is especially strong in Scotland, and ran three candidates for Glasgow at the last general election; but the three only got 2,222 votes between them, out of a total of 23,800 polled in the three divisions they contested. The ideas of the League have a certain vogue among the Highland crofters, where they blend very readily with the universal peasant doctrines that the earth is the Lord's, and that all other lords should be abolished.
In Scotland there are a good many branches of the two regular socialist organizations. The Scottish Emancipation League joined the Social Democratic Federation, and the Scottish Land and Labour League joined the Socialist League; but it is remarkable that there is no socialism in Ireland, except in a small branch of the Socialist League in Dublin, called the Dublin Socialist Club, although it seems a miracle for a country seething for centuries with political and economic discontent to escape such a visitation. Probably, as with the Poles, the minds of the discontented are already too much pre-occupied with other political and social solutions. The land nationalization views of Mr. George are, of course, spread widely through the influence of Mr. Michael Davitt in the agrarian movement of Ireland.
But while the recent wave of socialism has passed over discontented Ireland, and left it, like Gideon's fleece, quite dry, much more susceptibility has been shown by those parts of the Empire where the lot of labour is, perhaps in all the world, the happiest—the Australian colonies. Here, too, the susceptibility has been created to some extent by the land questions of the country. Mr. George, in his recent lecturing tour through these colonies, met with a warm welcome in almost all the towns he visited, made many converts to his ideas, and gave rise to a considerable agitation. In South Australia three of his disciples were returned to the Legislature in 1887, and their views are supported by several newspapers in Adelaide. In a new colony the argument for keeping the land in the hands of the State has in some respects more point and force than in an old. Mr. George's disciples in Sydney publish a paper called the Land Nationalizer, and his views are advocated by one of the most influential papers in the colony, the Bulletin of Sydney. In New Zealand a bill has actually been brought in for the purpose of nationalizing the land. But apart from Mr. George altogether, there is a flourishing Australian Socialist League in Sydney, established in 1887, and with a membership of 7,000 in 1888. It has a journal called the Radical, and keeps up a busy agitation with lectures and discussions. As a method of temporary policy it promotes associations of labourers for the purpose of undertaking Government and municipal contracts. In Melbourne, again, people are more advanced. They have no socialist organization, but they have an anarchist club, established in 1886 for the purpose of aiding social reform on the lines of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It circulates the works of Proudhon, Tucker, the Boston anarchist, Bakunin, and Mr. Auberon Herbert; and it publishes a newspaper called Honesty, which appeared at first once a month, and latterly once in two months. The ideas of the party are not easy to ascertain exactly from the pages of their journal. The State is, of course, the enemy, and land monopoly is one of the State's worst creations; but some of the writers advocate land nationalization, while others propound a scheme of what they call "constructive anarchy," under which every man is to own the land he occupies. They have started a new form of co-operative store, a kind of mutual production society, whose members bind themselves to produce for one another, and exchange their products for the bare cost of production; and they have started a co-operative home, in which the members get better and cheaper accommodation through their combination. Melbourne anarchism, however, has no harm in it: it is a mere spark of eccentric speculation. The working class of Melbourne is probably the most powerful and the best organized working class in the world. In their Trades Hall they have had for thirty years a workmen's chamber of their own creating like what German socialists are vainly asking from the State, and much more effective, because more independent. They have secured the eight hours day to fifty-two different trades without receiving a finger's help from the law, and without losing a shilling of wages. They have, moreover, the voting power in their own hands. In fact, they are, as nearly as any working class can be, in the precise condition socialists require for revolutionary action. They are entirely dependent on a handful of capitalists for their employment, and they have the whole power of the State substantially under their own control; so that they might, if they chose, march to the Parliament House with a red flag, and instal the socialist State to-morrow. But they do not choose. They propose no change in the present industrial system, and make surprisingly few demands of any sort upon the State. The world goes very well with them as it is, and they will not risk the comforts they really enjoy to try any sweeping and problematical solutions. While the socialist movement, in the countries where it is most advanced and powerful, seems settling into a practical labour movement, the labour movement, in the countries where it is most advanced and powerful, is steering furthest and clearest from socialism.
CHAPTER III. FERDINAND LASSALLE.
German socialism is—it is hardly too much to say—the creation of Ferdinand Lassalle. Of course there were socialists in Germany before Lassalle. There are socialists everywhere. A certain rudimentary socialism is always in latent circulation in what may be called the "natural heart" of society. The secret clubs of China—"the fraternal leagues of heaven and earth"—who argue that the world is iniquitously arranged, that the rich are too rich, and the poor too poor, and that the wealth of the great has all accrued from the sweat of the masses, only give a formal expression to ideas that are probably never far from any one of us who have to work hard and earn little, and they merely formulate them less systematically than Marx and his disciples do in their theories of the exploitation of labour by capital. Socialism is thus so much in the common air we all breathe, that there is force in the view that the thing to account for is not so much the presence of socialism, at any time, as its absence. Accordingly it had frequently appeared in Germany under various forms before Lassalle. Fichte—to go no farther back—had taught it from the standpoint of the speculative philosopher and philanthropist. Schleiermacher, it may be remembered, was brought up in a religious community that practised it. Weitling, with some allies, preached it in a pithless and hazy way as a gospel to the poor, and, finding little encouragement, went to America, to work it out experimentally there. The Young Hegelians made it part of their philosophic creed. The Silesian weavers, superseded by machinery, and perishing for want of work, raised it as a wild inarticulate cry for bread, and dignified it with the sanction of tears and blood. And Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in 1848, summoned the proletariat of the whole world to make it the aim and instrument of a universal revolution. But it was Lassalle who first really brought it from the clouds and made it a living historical force in the common politics of the day. The late eminent Professor Lorenz von Stein, of Vienna, said, in 1842, in his acute and thoughtful work on French Communism, that Germany, unlike France, and particularly England, had nothing to fear from socialism, because Germany had no proletariat to speak of. Yet, in twenty years, we find Germany become suddenly the theatre of the most important and formidable embodiment of socialism that has anywhere appeared. Important and formidable, for two reasons: it founds its doctrines, as socialism has never done before, on a thoroughly scientific investigation of the facts, and criticism of the principles, of the present industrial régime, and it seeks to carry them out by means of a political organization, growing singularly in strength, and based on the class interests of the great majority of the people.
There were, of course, predisposing conditions for this outburst. A German proletariat had come into being since Stein wrote, and though still much smaller, in the aggregate, than the English, it was perhaps really at this time the more plethoric and distressed of the two. For the condition of the English working-classes had been greatly relieved by emigration, by factory legislation, by trades unions, whereas in some of these directions nothing at all, and in others only the faintest beginnings, had as yet been effected in Germany. Then, the stir of big political movement and anticipation was on men's minds. The future of the German nation, its unity, its freedom, its development, were practical questions of the hour. The nationality principle is essentially democratic, and the aspirations for German unity carried with them in every one of the States strong movements for the extension of popular freedom and power. This long spasmodic battle for liberty in Germany, which began with the century, and remains still unsettled, this long series of revolts and concessions and overridings, and hopes flattered and again deferred, this long uncertain babble of Gross-Deutsch and Klein-Deutsch, and Centralist and Federalist and Particularist, of "Gotha ideas" and "new eras" and "blood and iron," had prepared the public ear for bold political solutions, and has entered from the first as an active and not unimportant factor in the socialist agitation. Then again, the general political habits and training of the people must be taken into account. Socialistic ideas would find a readier vogue in Germany than in this country, because the people are less rigidly practical, because they have been less used to the sifting exercise of free discussion, and because they have always seen the State doing a great deal for them which they could do better for themselves, and are consequently apt to visit the State with blame and claims for which it ought not to be made responsible. Then the decline of religious belief in Germany, which the Church herself did much to produce when she was rationalistic, without being able to undo it since she has become orthodox, must certainly have impaired the patience with which the poor endured the miseries of their lot, when they still entertained the hope of exchanging it in a few short years for a happier and an everlasting one hereafter.
All these circumstances undoubtedly favoured the success of the socialistic agitation at the period it started; but, when everything is said, it is still doubtful whether German socialism would ever have come into being but for Lassalle. Its fermenting principle has been less want than positive ideas. This is shown by the fact that it was at first received among the German working classes with an apathy that almost disheartened Lassalle; and that it is now zealously propagated by them as a cause, as an evangel, even after they have emigrated to America, where their circumstances are comparatively comfortable. The ideas it contains Lassalle found for the most part ready to his hand. The germs of them may be discovered in the writings of Proudhon, in the projects of Louis Blanc. Some of them he acknowledges he owes to Rodbertus, others to Karl Marx, but it was in passing through his mind they first acquired the stamp and ring that made them current coin. Contentions about the priority of publishing this bit or that bit of an idea, especially if the idea be false, need not concern us; and indeed Lassalle makes no claim to originality in the economical field. He was not so much an inventive as a critical thinker, and a critical thinker of almost the first rank, with a dialectic power, and a clear, vivid exposition that have seldom been excelled. Any originality that is claimed for him lies in the region of interpretation of previous thought, and that in the departments of metaphysics and jurisprudence, not of economics.
The peculiarity of his mind was that it hungered with almost equal intensity for profound study and for exciting action, and that he had the gifts as well as the impulses for both. As he said of Heraclitus the Dark, whom he spent some of his best years in expounding, "there was storm in his nature." Heine, who knew and loved him well as a young man in Paris, and indeed found his society so delightful during his last years of haggard suffering, that he said, "No one has ever done so much for me, and when I receive letters from you, courage rises in me, and I feel better,"—Heine characterizes him very truly in a letter to Varnhagen von Ense. He says he was struck with astonishment at the combination of qualities Lassalle displayed—the union of so much intellectual power, deep learning, rich exposition on the one hand, with so much energy of will and capacity for action on the other. With all this admiration, however, he seems unable to regard him without misgiving, for his audacious confidence, checked by no thought of renunciation or tremor of modesty, amazed him as much as his ability. In this respect he says Lassalle is a genuine son of the modern time, to which Varnhagen and himself had acted in a way as the midwives, but on which they could only look like the hen that hatched duck's eggs and shuddered to see how her brood took to the water and swam about delighted. Heine here puts his finger on the secret of his young friend's failure. Lassalle would have been a great man if he had more of the ordinary restraining perceptions, but he had neither fear nor awe, nor even—in spite of his vein of satire—a wholesome sense of the ridiculous,—in this last respect resembling, if we believe Carlyle, all Jews. Chivalrous, susceptible, with a genuine feeling for the poor man's case, and a genuine enthusiasm for social reform, a warm friend, a vindictive enemy, full of ambition both of the nobler and the more vulgar type, beset with an importunate vanity and given to primitive lusts; generous qualities and churlish throve and strove in him side by side, and governed or misgoverned a will to which opposition was almost a native and necessary element, and which yet—or perhaps rather, therefore—brooked no check. "Ferdinand Lassalle, thinker and fighter," is the simple epitaph Professor Boeckh put on his tomb. Thinking and fighting were the craving of his nature; thinking and fighting were the warp and woof of his actual career, mingled indeed with threads of more spurious fibre. The philosophical thinker and the political agitator are parts rarely combined in one person, but to these Lassalle added yet a third, which seems to agree with neither. He was a fashionable dandy, noted for his dress, for his dinners, and, it must be added, for his addiction to pleasure—a man apparently with little of that solidarity in his own being which he sought to introduce into society at large, and yet his public career possesses an undoubted unity. It is a mistake to represent him, as Mr. L. Montefiore has done, as a savan who turned politician as if by accident and against his will, for the stir of politics was as essential to him as the absorption of study. It is a greater mistake, though a more common one, to represent him as having become a revolutionary agitator because no other political career was open to him. He felt himself, it is said, like a Cæsar out of employ, disqualified for all legitimate politics by his previous life, and he determined, if he could not bend the gods, that he would move Acheron. But so early as 1848, when yet but a lad of twenty-three, he was tried for sedition, and he then declared boldly in his defence that he was a socialist democrat, and that he was "revolutionary on principle." This he remained throughout. He laughs at those who cannot hear the word revolution without a shudder. "Revolution," he says, "means merely transformation, and is accomplished when an entirely new principle is—either with force or without it—put in the place of an existing state of things. Reform, on the other hand, is when the principle of the existing state of things is continued, and only developed to more logical or just consequences. The means do not signify. A reform may be carried out by bloodshed, and a revolution in the profoundest tranquillity. The Peasants' War was an attempt to introduce reform by arms, the invention of the spinning-jenny wrought a peaceful revolution." In this sense he was "revolutionary on principle." His thought was revolutionary, and it was the lessons he learnt as a philosopher that he applied and pled for an agitator. His thinking and his fighting belonged together like powder and shot. His Hegelianism, which he adopted as a youth at college, is from first to last the continuous source both of impetus and direction over his public career. Young Germany was Hegelian and revolutionary at the time he went to the University (1842), and with the impressionable Lassalle, then a youth of seventeen, Hegelianism became a passion. He wrote articles on it in University magazines, preached it right and left in the cafés and taverns, and resolved to make philosophy his profession and establish himself as a privat Docent at Berlin University. It was the first sovereign intellectual influence he came under, and it ruled his spirit to the end. In adopting it, his intellectual manhood may be said to have opened with a revolution, for his family were strict Jews, and he was brought up in their religion.