A history of socialism

by Thomas Kirkup

Amidst the group of nations who thus participated in the Greco-Roman culture and in the Christian life, there has always been a special degree of international sympathy: ideas and institutions have been largely common to them all. Feudalism and the Church, chivalry and the Crusades, all these were international in their influence.

Then, as now, great ideas and great movements could not be confined within national barriers. In the expansive and progressive epochs of history, particularly, supreme interests have raised men above the prejudices of race, and have united them by wider and deeper principles than those by which they are separated into nations.

At the great religious revolt of the sixteenth century, Germans combined with the Swedes and the French against their own countrymen. The Catholic Church, as its name implies, has always been, and still continues to be, a great international institution.

The enlightenment of the eighteenth century had an international influence, and at the French Revolution high concerns of political and social freedom for a time broke through the conventional feelings of patriotism. Germans, Italians, and even Englishmen, were in many cases ready to receive the boon of a better order of things at the price of French victory over their own countrymen. Only for a time, till the enthusiasm of the Revolution was made subservient to the selfishness of the new France—an instrument for the colossal egotism of a single man.

In our time, steam and the electric telegraph have become the bearers of a widening international movement. All the great human interests are cultivated and pursued on a wider scale than ever—religion, science, literature, art.

Commerce and industry have naturally shared in the general expansion. We have only to scan the operations of the great markets and exchanges in any daily paper as a proof of this. In a small space round the Bank of England, financial transactions are carried on which powerfully affect the entire world. Even the very simple breakfast of an ordinary citizen is a great international function, in which the productions of the most diverse countries combine to appease his wants.

The methods and appliances of this modern industry have been developed in England since the middle of the eighteenth century. Not many years ago England was still the supreme, almost the exclusive, representative of the new industry; now it is becoming the common possession of all countries dominated by European culture, and is rapidly gaining ground in the long-isolated nations of the East. The competition for business among the capitalists of various countries grows more intense every year. Once carried on chiefly or entirely for local needs, production has now to work for a market of wide and often incalculable extent.

Under these circumstances, we need not be surprised that labour, the prime factor in industry, has international interests and relations of the most serious importance. Its antagonism to capitalism must declare itself on the international arena. In the competitive struggles of the last sixty years, the cheap labour of one nation has not seldom been thrown into the scale to weigh down the dear labour of another. Irishmen, Germans, Belgians, and Italians have often rendered unavailing the efforts of English and French workmen for a higher standard of living. Continuous emigration from Europe depresses American labour. The Chinese and other Eastern races, habituated to a very low standard of subsistence, menace the workmen of America and Australia. The great industry which is now being established in the East will be a most serious danger alike to workmen and capitalists in the Western World.

The capitalists of most countries have long sought to shield themselves against the consequences of competition by protection, by combinations tacit or avowed among themselves, of wide and frequently international magnitude. In view of the facts that we have indicated, in view of the example thus set them, why should not the working men seek to regulate their international interests?

Efforts towards the international organisation of labour have proceeded chiefly from men who, banished from their own country by reactionary governments, have carried to other lands the seeds of new thought, and, meeting abroad those of like mind and like fate with themselves, have naturally planned the overthrow of their common oppressors. The origin of the famous International Association of Working Men was largely due to such a group of exiles.