These words are often quoted even in these placid days of evolution that have replaced the red days of violence. The workingmen of all countries are uniting, as we shall see, not for bloody revolution nor for the violence of passion, but for the promulgation of peace. To-day the silent coercion of multitudes is taking the place of the eruptive methods of the '40's and the '70's.
As to the ultimate form of organized society, there is nothing but confusion to be found in the mass of literature that has grown up around the subject. The earliest writers were cocksure of themselves; the latest ones bridge over the question with wide-arching generalities. I have asked many of their leaders to give me some hint as to what form their Society of To-morrow will take. Every one dodged. "No one can tell. It will be humanitarian and co-operative."
If one could be assured of this!
Finally, all Socialists agree in the instrument of change. It lies at hand as the greatest co-operative achievement of our race, the state. It is the common possession of all, and it is the one power that can lay its hands upon property and compel its obedience. The power of the state is to be the dynamo of change. This state is naturally to be democratic. The people shall hold the reins of power in their own hands.
It must be remembered that every year sees a shifting in the Socialist's attitude. As he has left the sphere of mere fault-finding and of dreaming, and has entered politics, entered the labor war through unions, and the business war through co-operative societies, he has been compelled to adapt himself to the necessities of things as they are.
I have tried briefly to show that Socialism originated as a class movement, a proletarian movement; that the classes, wage-earner and capitalist, are the natural outcome of machine production; that Socialism is one of the natural products of the antagonistic relations that these two classes at present occupy; that Socialism intends to eliminate this antagonism by eliminating the private employer. I have tried to show also that Socialism is a criticism of the present social order placing the blame for the miseries of society upon the shoulders of private property and competition; that it is optimistic in spirit, buoyant in hope; and that its program of reconstruction is confused and immature.
Stripped of its glamour, our society is in a neck-to-neck race for things, for property. Its hideousness has shocked the sensibilities of dreamers and humanitarians. Our machine industry has produced a civilization that is ugly. It is natural that the esthetic and philanthropic members of this society should raise their protest. Ruskin and Anatole France and Maeterlinck and Carlyle and Robert Morris and Emerson and Grierson are read with increasing satisfaction. It is natural that the participants in this death race should utter their cries of alternate despair and hope. Socialism is the cry of the toiler. It is not to be ignored. We in America have no conception of its potency. There are millions of hearts in Europe hanging upon its precepts for the hope that makes life worth the fight.
Their Utopia may be only a rainbow, a mirage in the mists on the horizon. But the energy which it has inspired is a reality. It has organized the largest body of human beings that the world has known. Its international Socialist movement has but one rival for homogeneity and zeal, the Church, whose organization at one time embraced all kingdoms and enlisted the faithful service of princes and paupers.
It is this reality in its political form which I hope to set forth in the following pages. We will try to discover what the Socialist movement is doing in politics, how much of theory has been merged in political practice, what its everyday parliamentary drudgery is, and, if possible, to tell in what direction the movement is tending.
Before we do this it is necessary to state briefly the history of the underlying theories of the movement.