This is certainly a false and unjust view. The leading communists and socialists from the time of Plato up to the present have been, for the most part, men of character, wealth, talent, and high social standing. Of Plato it is unnecessary to speak, since people are not in the habit of calling him a shallow demagogue. Sir Thomas More, the author of the communistic romance “Utopia,” was lovable, learned, and socially honored. Robert Owen, the English communist, was a wealthy manufacturer and a distinguished philanthropist. Of Rodbertus, Marx, and Lassalle I shall speak presently. If we examine the history of even those who are less known among the German social democrats of to-day, we shall discover that a great number have made sacrifices for their faith. Hunted about and persecuted as they are, it is assuredly no light matter to proclaim one’s self a social democrat. While, of course, among communists and socialists, selfishness, meanness, and enough that is contemptible may be found, I do not believe any movement of modern society is able to exhibit a greater amount of unselfish devotion than that they represent.
A second charge against the communists consists in making them responsible for the doings of the Parisian mob in 1871. The error of this has been explained often enough. It is due largely to an accidental resemblance between the words commune and communism. Many who use the word commune glibly have a very imperfect understanding of its significance, and little imagine that it is as harmless and innocent a word as township, and means pretty much the same thing. The commune, with an emphasis on the article, means simply Paris, or, in a secondary sense, the administrative officers collectively governing Paris. France is divided into departments and communes, the same as our states are divided into counties and townships, and Paris by itself forms one of these communes. The insurrection in Paris, of March 18, 1871, was one in favor of extreme local self-government. The idea was to make each commune at least as independent as one of the states of the United States, and to unite all the communes into a confederation with limited powers.[11] The movement in favor of the autonomy of Paris is an old one, and has been supported by many able and respectable Frenchmen. One in favor of the movement is, however, properly called a communalist, and not a communist, and the movement itself is communalism—not communism. A careful study of the decrees of the commune, of the reports and of the various histories which have described its rebellion in 1871, shows that the movement was political, primarily, and only to a very limited extent economic. Even the economic decrees, like the stay-laws, postponing the time for payment of debts due, might be regarded as war measures. However, out of the seventy and more members of the communal government nine or ten were social democrats and members of the International, and it is probable that concessions may have been made to win them and their adherents. They were effectual in this, since the Internationalists were disposed to favor the movement from the start, and that for two reasons. First, believing that their ends can be attained only by revolution, they are inclined to look favorably upon any revolution whatever, as tending to cultivate a revolutionary spirit in the people. Second, they favor the autonomy of large cities, holding that the masses in the cities might more readily be induced to adopt communistic and socialistic reforms, if not held in check by the more conservative rural population.[12]
But let us ask ourselves this question: If all the members of the communal government had been communists in the ordinary sense of the word, would communism have been necessarily condemned? I think that another question will help us to answer this. All the members of that government were republicans: was republicanism then necessarily condemned? No one but a rabid tory would think of giving an affirmative answer to this second question. It is at once seen that the republican form of government is not responsible for the conduct of every scoundrel who professes republican principles.
It is urged further that communism and socialism would destroy religion and the family institution. The reason of this complaint is evident enough. A number of social reformers have been at the same time atheists and advocates of free love. The questions of atheism and free love are, however, totally different from that of even communism, the most radical of all the reforms proposed. There is no necessary connection whatever between them. If it could once be shown that communism were practicable, it would be easy to give many reasons for supposing that in such a society the love between man and wife and parents and children would be freer from selfish and sordid motives than at present.[13] The clergy are partly to blame for the irreligious attitude of many modern socialists. They have too often made themselves the advocates of conservatism simply as conservatism, regardless of all abuses which it embraced. In countries where Church and State are connected, the clergy have been too often a sort of police, assisting the government to maintain existing institutions, and to oppose change, good or bad. They have favored the higher classes, upon whom their support has depended, and neglected the interests of the poor and down-trodden. I do not write this as an enemy of the Church, but as her friend. Nor do I express myself differently from the best of our clergymen at present. Rev. Dr. Rylance, indeed, has, in his “Lectures on Social Questions,” clothed this same thought in stronger language. In one place he says, “The proper relations of Christianity to the legitimate efforts of socialism to improve the condition of the suffering classes will never be understood, or the minds of those now alienated from the religion of Christ will never be disabused of their antipathy, till the essential claims of that religion be set in fairer and fuller light; all the perversions it has suffered being frankly acknowledged, and the wrongs done in its name, as far as possible, atoned for. Your Church histories are full of such perversions, while your most expert apologists cannot disguise the wrongs ... Ecclesiasticism[14] has often been a fraud and a tyranny in history. As the Church grew in power and wealth, it allied itself to power and wealth in the hands of civil rulers and their creatures, and the fruits of the alliance have often been wicked and infamous.”
Dr. Rylance also declares that Christianity is a sort of socialism, and quotes in proof these texts of Scripture, among others: “As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another.” “If ye fulfil the royal law, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, ye do well; but if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin.” “This commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God, love his brother also.”[15]
“One way of aspersing the doctrines of communism,” says another writer,[16] “is to call them anti-Christian. It is forgotten that the Christian idea of equality underlies all the reasonings of communism, and communism has succeeded only in so far as it was Christian in principle, having for its fundamental maxim brotherly love. In this, communism is much more Christian than the hankering after privileges of the old aristocracy, or the unbounded avarice of the plutocracy.”
There are other false accusations brought against communism and socialism, which it is not necessary to examine now. A well-disposed person will scarcely experience difficulty in separating them from scientific argument.
It behooves us to disabuse our minds of all prejudice and ill-will. It is only thus that we shall be able to meet and overcome the social dangers which threaten even our own country in a not very distant future. We have never had a permanent laboring class, but with the increase of population one is rapidly developing. If it is now becoming extremely difficult for the laborer to rise, what will the condition of things be when we number two hundred millions? And that time is not so far off. At our present rate of increase, it will come when some of us are still living. It is a laboring class without hope of improvement for themselves or their children which will first test our institutions. But he must be singularly blind or unacquainted with the views of the various social classes who is unable to detect even now, in certain quarters, the formation of habits and modes of thought characteristic of the poorer classes in Europe. The fact of this growth was twice brought home to me forcibly two winters ago. As I was walking by the Union League Club-house, in New York city, at the time of its house-warming, while the people were driving up in their fine carriages, one poor fellow stood on the opposite side of the street watching the ladies enter in their luxurious and extravagant toilets. He was a good-looking, intelligent-appearing man, but wore no overcoat. It was a cold evening, and he seemed to me to be shivering. He was evidently thinking of the difference between his lot and that of the fashionable people he was observing; and I heard him mutter bitterly to himself, “A revolution will yet come and level that fine building to the ground.” A friend of mine, about the same time, passed a couple of laborers as he was walking by Mr. Vanderbilt’s new houses on Fifth Avenue. Some kind of bronze work, I believe, was being carried in, and he heard one of them remark, savagely, “The time will come when that will be melted by fire.”
More significant and more ominous still is the reception accorded in this country to a man like John Most, who has been expelled from the social-democratic party in Germany on account of his extreme views, particularly respecting assassination as a means of progress. He has been travelling about the United States, has been warmly received, and listened to with favor by large bodies of workmen while uttering counsels of war and bloodshed. On the 11th of February, 1883, he lectured in Baltimore. It was a cold, rainy, cheerless day, and the sidewalks were so covered with melting snow as to make it extremely unpleasant to venture out of doors. But Most had a full hall of eager listeners. He told the laborers that he had little hope of their overthrowing their oppressors by the use of the ballot. He believed their emancipation would be brought about by violence, as all great reforms in the past had been. He consequently advised them to buy muskets. He said a musket was a good thing to have. If it was not needed now, it could be placed in the corner, and it occupied but little space. The presiding officer, in closing the meeting, emphasized this part of Most’s address particularly. He told the laborers that a piece of paper would never make them free, that a musket was worth a hundred votes, and closed with the lines—