Besides, the socialist is, almost by necessity of his position and principles, predisposed to discourage and condemn patriotism. Others, indeed, condemn it as well as he. Most of the great writers who revived German literature towards the beginning of this century—Lessing, Herder, Wieland, Goethe—have all disparaged it. They looked on it as a narrow and obsolete virtue, useful enough perhaps in rude times, but a hindrance to rational progress now; the modern virtue was humanity, the idea of which had just freshly burst upon their age like a new power. This consideration may no doubt to some extent weigh with socialists also, for their whole thinking is leavened with the notion of humanity, but their most immediate objection to patriotism is one of a practical nature. Their complaint used always to be that the proletarian had no country, because he was excluded from political rights. He was not a citizen, and why should he have the feelings of one? But now he has got political rights, and they still complain. He is in the country, they say, but not yet of it. He is practically excluded from its civilization, from all that makes the country worth living or fighting for. He has no country, for he is denied a man's share in the life that is going in any. Edmund Ludlow wrote over his door in exile—
"Every land is my fatherland,
For all lands are my Father's."
The modern socialist says, No land is my fatherland, for in none am I a son. He believes himself to be equally neglected in all, and that is precisely the severest strain that can try the patriotic sentiment. The proletarian is taught that in every country he is a slave, and that patriotism and religion only reconcile him to remaining so. Moreover, as Rodbertus has remarked, the social question itself is, in a sense, international because it is social.
CHAPTER IV. KARL MARX.
In opening the present chapter in the previous edition of this book, I said it was not a little remarkable that the works of Karl Marx, which had then excited considerable commotion in other European countries, were still absolutely unknown in England, though England was the country where they were written, and to whose circumstances they were, in their author's judgment, pre-eminently applicable. His principal work, "Das Kapital," is a criticism of modern industrial development as explained by English economists and exemplified in English society. It shows a rare knowledge of English economic literature, even of the most obscure writers; it goes very fully into the conditions of English labour as described in our parliamentary reports; and out of four hundred odd books it quotes, more than three hundred are English books. Its illustrations are drawn from English industrial life, and its very money allusions are stated in terms of English coin. Its chief doctrine, moreover, was an old English doctrine, familiar among the disciples of Owen; and to crown all, if the author's belief was true, England was the country ripest for its reception, for the socialist revolution, he thought, would inevitably come when the working class sunk into the condition of a proletariat, and the working class of England had been a proletariat for many years already. Yet Marx's work was not at that time (1884) translated into English, though it had been into most other European languages, and had enjoyed a very large sale even in Russia, to whose circumstances it had admittedly very little adaptation. An English translation appeared at length, however, in 1887, twenty years after the publication of the original, and a considerable edition was disposed of within a year, though the price was high. We have therefore grown more familiar of late with the name and importance of Karl Marx.
Born at Trèves in 1818, the son of a Christian Jew who had a high post in the civil service, Marx was sent to the University of Bonn, towards the end of the '30s, won a considerable reputation there in philosophy and jurisprudence, determined, like Lassalle, to devote himself to the academic profession, and seemed destined for an eminently successful career, in which his subsequent marriage with the sister of the Prussian Minister of State, Von Westphalen, would certainly have facilitated his advancement. But at the University he came under the spell of Hegel, and passed, step by step, with the Extreme Left of the Hegelian school, into the philosophical, religious, and political Radicalism which finally concentrated into the Humanism of Feuerbach. Just as he had finished his curriculum, the accession of Frederick William IV. in 1840 stirred a rustle of most misplaced expectation among the Liberals of Germany, who thought the day of freedom was at length to break, and who rose with generous eagerness to the tasks to which it was to summon them. Under the influence of these hopes and feelings, Marx abandoned the professorial for an editorial life, and committed himself at the very outset of his days to a political position which compromised him hopelessly with German governments, and forced him, step by step, into a long career of revolutionary agitation and organization. He joined the staff of the Rhenish Gazette, which was founded at that time in Cologne by the leading Liberals of the Rhine country, including Camphausen and Hansemann, and which was the organ of the Young Hegelian, or Philosophical Radical Party, and he made so great an impression by his bold and vigorous criticism of the proceedings of the Rhenish Landtag that he was appointed editor of the newspaper in 1842. In this post he continued his attacks on the Government, and they were at once so effective and so carefully worded that a special censor was sent from Berlin to Cologne to take supervision of his articles, and when this agency proved ineffectual, the journal was suppressed by order of the Prussian Ministry in 1843. From Cologne Marx went to Paris to be a joint editor of the Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher with Arnold Ruge, a leader of the Hegelian Extreme Left, who had been deprived of his professorship at the University of Halle by the Prussian Government, and whose magazine, the Deutsche Jahrbücher, published latterly at Leipzig to escape the Prussian authority, had just been suppressed by the Saxon. The Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher were published by the well-known Julius Froebel, who had some time before given up his professorship at Zürich to edit a democratic newspaper, and open a shop for the sale of democratic literature; who professed himself a communist in Switzerland, and had written some able works, with very radical and socialistic leanings, but who seems to have gone on a different tack at the time of the Lassallean movement, for he was—as Meding shows us in his "Memoiren zur Zeitgeschichte"—the prime promoter of the ill-fated Congress of Princes at Frankfort in 1865. The new magazine was intended to be a continuation of the suppressed Deutsche Jahrbücher, on a more extended plan, embracing French as well as German contributors, and supplying in some sort a means of uniting the Extreme Left of both nations; but no French contribution ever appeared in it, and it ceased altogether in a year's time, probably for commercial reasons, though there is no unlikelihood in the allegation sometimes made, that it was stopped in consequence of a difference between the editors as to the treatment of the question of communism.
The Young Hegelians had already begun to take the keenest interest in that question, but were, for a time, curiously perplexed as to the attitude they should assume towards it. They seem to have been fascinated and repelled by turns by the system, and to have been equally unable to cast it aside or to commit themselves fairly to it. Karl Grün, himself a Young Hegelian, says that at first they feared socialism, and points, for striking evidence of this, to the fact that the Rhenish Gazette bestowed an enthusiastic welcome on Stein's book on French communism, although that book condemned the system from a theologically orthodox and politically reactionary point of view. But he adds that the Young Hegelians contributed to the spread of socialism against their will, that it was through the interest they took in its speculations and experiments that socialism acquired credit and support in public opinion in Germany, and that the earliest traces of avowed socialism are to be found in the Rhenish Gazette. If we may judge by the extracts from some of Marx's articles in that journal which are given in Bruno Bauer's "Vollständige Geschichte der Parthei-Kämpfe in Deutschland während der Jahre 1842-46," we should say that Marx was even at this early period a decided socialist, for he often complains of the great wrong "the poor dumb millions" suffer in being excluded by their poverty from the possibility of a free development of their powers, "and from any participation in the fruits of civilization," and maintains that the State had far other duty towards them than to come in contact with them only through the police. When Ruge visited Cabet in Paris, he said that he and his friends (meaning, he explained, the philosophical and political opposition) stood so far aloof from the question of communism that they had never yet so much as raised it, and that, while there were communists in Germany, there was no communistic party. This statement is probably equivalent to saying that he and his school took as yet a purely theoretical and Platonic interest in socialism, and had not come to adopt it as part of their practical programme. Most of them were already communists by conviction, and the others felt their general philosophical and political principles forcing them towards communism, and the reason of their hesitation in accepting it is probably expressed by Ruge, when he says (in an article in Heinzen's "Die Opposition," p. 103), that the element of truth in communism was its sense of the necessity of political emancipation, but that there was a great danger of communists forgetting the political question in their zeal for the social. It was chiefly under the influence of the Humanism into which Feuerbach had transformed the Idealism of Hegel, that the Hegelian Left passed into communism. Humanist and communist became nearly convertible terms. Friedrich Engels mentions in his book on the condition of the English working classes, published in 1845, that all the German communists of that day were followers of Feuerbach, and most of the followers of Feuerbach in Germany (Ruge seems to have remained an exception) were communists. Lassalle was one of Feuerbach's correspondents, and after he started the present socialist movement in Germany, he wrote Feuerbach on 21st October, 1863, saying that the Progressists were political rationalists of the feeblest type, and that it was the same battle which Feuerbach was waging in the theological, and he himself now in the political and economic sphere. Stein attributed French socialism greatly to the prevailing sensualistic character of French philosophy, which conceived enjoyment to be man's only good, and never rose to what he calls the great German conception, the logical conception of the Ego, the idea of knowing for the sake of knowing. The inference this contrast suggests is that the metaphysics of Germany had been her protector, her national guard, against socialism, but as we see, at the very time he was writing the guard was turning traitor, and a native socialism was springing up by natural generation out of the idealistic philosophy. The fact, however, rather confirms the force of Stein's remark, for the Hegelian idealism first bred the more sensualistic system of humanism, and then humanism bred socialism.