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"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands, as the basis of the State, (1) Universal, equal, and direct suffrage, together with secret and obligatory voting, for all citizens over twenty years of age, in all elections in State and commune. The election day must be a Sunday or holiday. (2) Direct legislation by the people. Decision on peace or war by the people. (3) Universal liability to military service. Militia instead of standing army. (4) Abolition of all exceptional laws, especially laws interfering with liberty of the press, of association, and of meeting; in general, all laws restricting free expression of opinion, free thought, and free inquiry. (5) Administration of justice by the people. Gratuitous justice. (6) Universal, compulsory, gratuitous, and equal education of the people by the State. Religion to be declared a private affair.

"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands within the conditions of existing society (1) The utmost possible extension of political rights and liberties in the sense of the above demands. (2) The replacement of all existing taxes, and especially of indirect taxes, which peculiarly burden the people, by a single progressive income tax for State and commune. (3) Unrestricted right of combination. (4) A normal working day corresponding to the needs of society. Prohibition of Sunday labour. (5) Prohibition of the labour of children, and of all labour for women that is injurious to health and morality. (6) Laws for protection of the life and health of workmen. Sanitary control of workmen's dwellings. Inspection of mines, factories, workshops, and home industry by officers chosen by working men. An effective employers' liability act. (7) Regulation of prison labour. (8) Entire freedom of management for all funds for the assistance and support of working men."

A committee was appointed at the recent Halle Congress to revise this programme and report to the Congress of 1891; but as the revision is merely intended to place the programme in greater conformity with the needs of the time, and keep it as it were up to date, only minor modifications may be expected, and those probably in the direction of a more practical and effectual dealing with existing grievances. Five years ago the party thought a ten hours' day corresponded with the needs of the time; they now ask for an eight hours' one. Instead of the prohibition of Sunday labour, they now prefer to demand, as a more workable equivalent, a period of thirty-six hours' continuous and uninterrupted rest every week, irrespective of any particular day; and they have sometimes taken up new working-class questions not especially mentioned in their programme, or included directly under any of its heads, like the abolition of payment of wages in kind. The whole spirit of the late Congress leads us to look for the contemplated modifications in this direction of meeting more effectually immediate working-class wants.

Many eyes were upon that Congress; for it was the first the German socialists had held since they had recovered their freedom and proved their strength. They were now clearly stronger than any socialist party the world had yet seen, and much stronger than most revolutionary parties who have made successful revolution. Would then the word now be revolution? people asked. It was not: the word was caution. The first effect of the victory in February had been otherwise, and in June, Herr Bebel was still calling, Steady. "The majority of his party colleagues," he said at a public meeting in Berlin on the 20th of that month, "had been intoxicated by the result of the elections of February 20th, and believed they could do what they liked with the middle class, as it was already on the point of going under." But before October steadier counsels prevailed, and the spirit of the Congress was moderation itself. Although the Congress did not agree to the motion to restore to the party programme the phrase "by lawful means," which had been deleted from the opening paragraph of the second part of it by the Wyden Congress of 1880, in consequence of the Anti-Socialist Laws no longer giving them any choice except recourse to unlawful means, the general and decided feeling of the Congress certainly was that only lawful means could now answer their purposes. The controversy was repeatedly raised by an extreme section of the party from Berlin, who complained that the work of their parliamentary representatives had hitherto entirely ignored the real aims of social democracy, and that a return should now be made to its socialism and its revolution. But the voice of the meeting was invariably against this Berlin movement. There was a time, said M. Fleischman—and his speech was applauded—when it was counted the right thing in the party to make revolutionary speeches, and point to the coming day of account when mankind were to be emancipated at one blow; but that was not a road they could make any progress by. And as for boycotting, which had been spoken of, he declared he was all for boycotting; but it was the boycotting of the military in such a way as to give them no occasion for the use of their weapons. Liebknecht, the chief leader of the party, followed, and was quite as emphatic in the same line. People spoke of revolution, he said; but they should remember that roast pigeons don't fly into one's mouth by themselves. It was easy enough to make bitter speeches, and any fool and donkey could throw bombs; but the misadventures of the anarchists showed plainly enough that nothing could be done in that way. The socialists had now 20 per cent. of the population; but what could 20 per cent. do against 80 per cent. by the use of force? No, it was not force; it was reason they must use if they would succeed. What, then, he asked, was the Social Democracy to do? They must avoid divisions among themselves, and go out and convert the still indifferent masses. The electoral suffrage was their best weapon of agitation, and their surest means of increasing the party. Prince Bismarck had been represented in a popular book as practising peasant-fishery and elector-fishery. "Peasant-fishery and elector-fishery—" said Liebknecht, amid much applause, "that is the word for the Social Democrats to-day."

Another suggestion of the extreme section was that the party should now assail the Church and religion, as socialist and revolutionary parties have so generally done; but this bit of their old traditional policy received scant regard from the Halle Congress. A strong feeling was expressed that the party had damaged itself in the past by its assaults on the Church, and that its present policy ought, in self-preservation, to be one of religious neutrality and toleration. "Instead," said Liebknecht, "of squandering our strength in a struggle with the Church and sacerdotalism, let us go to the root of the matter. We desire to overthrow the State of the classes. When we have done that, the Church and sacerdotalism will fall with it, and in this respect we are much more radical and much more definite in purpose than our opponents, for we like neither the priests nor the anti-priests." The old revolutionary policy of stirring up hatred against all existing institutions is thus relegated from the present to the distant future, after the present class-State is overthrown and the working-class or socialist State established in its place.

"Well, then," suggested another old-world socialist, "let us, at any rate, issue a pamphlet describing the glories of this socialist State, and get the people prepared to flock into it"; but this suggestion was also frowned down. "For," said Liebknecht, "who could say what the Zukunft Staat—the socialist State of the future—is to be? Who could foresee so much as the development of the existing German State for a single year?" In other words—I think I am not misinterpreting their meaning—the State of the future is the concern of the future; the business of a living party is within the needs and within the lines of the living present.

What, then, is to be the business of this formidable Social Democratic party? Peasant-catching is the word. The elections showed that while the party was very strong in the large towns, it was very weak in the rural districts, and among special populations like the Poles and Alsatians; and although previous revolutionists thought everything was gained if the large towns were gained, the Social Democrats generally admit that the social revolution is impossible without the adherence of the peasantry. The peasants, therefore, must be won over to the party. Once in the party, they may learn socialism and revolution, but they must first be brought in, and for that purpose there must be started a special peasants' cry—a cry, that is, for the redress of some immediate grievance of that class; and one suggestion made at the Congress was, that the cry for the peasantry should be the abolition of the German Gesinde (farm-servant) system. In the same spirit the Congress recommended the parliamentary party to take up the question of seamen's rights, and agitate for better regulations for securing the wellbeing of that class. The advance towards practicality is even more evident in their determination upon strikes. Hitherto, for the most part, socialists have either looked on strikes with lofty disdain as poor attempts to get a petty rise in wages instead of abolishing the present wages system altogether, or they have thrown themselves into strikes for the mere purpose of fomenting labour troubles, and breaking perchance the power of the large capitalist class; and this latter view was not unrepresented at the Halle Congress. The resolution of the Congress, however, declared (1st) that strikes and boycotting were often useful means of improving the social position of the labouring class; but (2nd) that they were to be resorted to even for that purpose with great circumspection. "Whereas, however, strikes and boycotting are double-edged weapons which, when used in unsuitable places and at an inopportune moment, are calculated to do more harm than good to the interests of the working class, this Congress recommends German working men carefully to weigh the circumstances under which they purpose to make use of those weapons." The revolutionary ideal seems thus to be retreating—perhaps insensibly—in the socialistic mind into an eschatological decoration, into a kind of future Advent which is to come and to be believed in; but the practical concerns of the present must be more and more treated in their own practical way.

Since the Congress, the party has issued a manifesto to the peasantry, in which, after promising a new and happy day that is coming for them, which is to restore to them the beautiful earth and the poetry of life, they declare against the patriarchal system, and the increase of brandy distilling; and then, confessing that few socialists know anything about agricultural questions, invite information and discussion for the enlightenment of the party. Here again they forget that they have a theory which is as applicable to agriculture as to manufactures, and they want to make practical investigations with a view to practical solutions.

Of course the movement will always generate revolutionary elements as occasions arise, and these sometimes of the wildest character. Most and Hasselman, and their following, who were expelled at the Congress of Wyden in 1880, were anarchists of a violent type, and Mosts and Hasselmans may arise again. But at present anarchism hardly exists in Germany, and the Social Democratic party is peacefully trying to make people as comfortable as possible till the fulness of time arrives.

It may be added that the present income of the party, as stated at the last Congress, is £19,525, and that since February, 1890, they have established nineteen daily newspapers and forty weekly, with a total circulation of 254,000.

The socialist movement in other countries may be disposed of much more briefly, for in no other country has it worn anything like the same importance, except in Russia, and of the Russian agitation I shall treat more fully in a subsequent chapter on "Russian Nihilism." I may observe here, however, that the Russian agitation has not been without its influence on the nations of Western Europe. It was Bakunin who first kindled the socialist movements of Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Holland, and the anarchist fermentations of the last six years have been due in no inconsiderable measure to the new leaven of Russian ideas introduced by men like Prince Krapotkin and the two hundred other Russian refugees that are scattered abroad in the free countries of Europe.

In France there is much animated socialist agitation, but no solid and coherent socialist party such as exists in Germany. The movement is disunited and fragmentary, and confined almost entirely to the large towns, where many circumstances conspire to favour its growth. The French working class are born to revolutionary traditions. The better portion of them, moreover, though they long since gave up all belief in the old native forms of socialism, never ceased to be imbued with socialist ideas and aspirations; and M. de Molinari said in 1869, from his experience of French working men's clubs, that out of every ten French working men who had any interest beyond eating and drinking, nine were Socialists. Then there is in France a larger proportion of the working class than in most countries, who are kept in constant poverty and discontent and commotion by their own improvident habits. A pamphlet called "Le Sublime," which attracted considerable attention some years ago, stated that only forty per cent. of the working men of Paris were out of debt; and Mr. Malet reported to the English Foreign Office that they were, as a body, so dissipated that none of them had grandchildren or grandfathers. But, on the other hand, France enjoys a solid security against the successful advance of socialism in her peasant proprietors. Half the French population belong to that class, and their industry, thrift, and comfort have long been held up to our admiration by economists. According to M. de Lavergne, they are not so well fed, so well clad, or so well lodged as the farm labourers of England; but, living in a different climate, they have fewer wants, and are undoubtedly more contented. Among people like these, passing their days in frugal comfort and fruitful industry, and looking with quiet hope and confidence to the future, socialism finds, of course, no open door. On the contrary, every man of them feels he has something to lose and nothing to gain by social revolution; the fear of socialism is, indeed, one of the chief influences guiding their political action; and as they are as numerous as all the other classes in the community put together, their worldly contentment is a bulwark of enormous value to the existing order of things. The impression of their substantial independence is so marked that even the Frenchmen who were members of the International Working Men's Association would not assent to the abolition of a peasant proprietary, but always insisted, contrary to the principles of the Association, on the continued maintenance of that system as a necessary counterpoise to the power of the Government.

The present socialist groups and sects of France are all believers in the so-called scientific socialism of Marx and Lassalle, and the most important of them work for a programme substantially identical with that of Gotha. Marx's ideas were introduced among the French by the International, and they were adopted by a section of the Revolutionary Committee of the Paris Commune, 1871; but after the suppression of the Commune, they made so little stir for some years that Thiers declared, in his last manifesto as President of the Republic, that socialism, which was then busy in Germany, was absolutely dead in France. Its recrudescence was chiefly due to the activity of the Communards. Some of them had escaped to London, where they got into closer communion with Marx and his friends; and in 1874, thirty-four of these refugees, all military or administrative officers of the Commune, and most of them not professed socialists before, issued a manifesto pronouncing entirely for socialism, and describing the Commune as "the militant form of the social revolution"; but it was not till after the amnesty of the Communards, and their return from New Caledonia and elsewhere in 1880, that the first sensible ripple of socialist agitation was felt in France since the downfall of the second Republic. Numbers of socialist journals began to appear, and a general congress of working men, held at Havre in 1880, adopted a programme modelled on the lines of that of the German Social Democrats, and made preparations for an active propaganda and organization.

The adoption of the socialistic programme, however, rent the Congress in three, and the two opposite wings, the Co-operationists and the Anarchists, withdrew and established separate organizations of their own. The co-operationists, believing that the amelioration of the working class would only come by the gradual execution of practicable and suitable measures, and that these could only be successfully carried by means of skilful alliances with existing political parties, declared the Havre programme to be a programme for the year 2000, and that the true policy of the working-class now was a policy of possibilities. This last word is said to supply the origin of the term Possibilist, which has now come to be applied not to this co-operationist party, but to one of the two divisions into which the third or centre party of the Havre Congress—the socialists—shortly afterwards split up.

The co-operationists formed themselves into a body known as the Republican Socialist Alliance, which, as the name indicates, aims at social reforms under the existing republican form of State. They have held several congresses, their membership includes many well-known and even eminent Radical politicians—M. Clemenceau, for example—and they were supported by leading Radical journals, like Le Justice and L'Intransigeant; but their activity and their numbers have both dwindled away, probably because their work was done sufficiently well already by other political or working-class organizations.

The anarchists set up not a single organization, but a number of little independent clubs, which agree with one another mainly in their dislike of all constituted authority. They want to have all things in common, somehow or other; but for master or superior of any sort they will have none, be it king or committee. Their ideas find ready favour in France, because they are near allied with the theory of the Revolutionary Commune cherished among the Communards; and although there is no means of calculating their numbers exactly, they are believed to be pretty strong—at least, in the South of France. At the time of the Lyons Anarchist trial, at which Prince Krapotkin was convicted, they claimed themselves to have 8,000 adherents in Lyons alone. In 1886 the authorities knew of twenty little anarchist clubs in Paris, which had between them, however, only a membership of 1,500; and of these a considerable proportion were foreign immigrants, especially Austrians and Russians, with a few Spaniards. Some of these clubs are mainly convivial, with a dash of treason for pungency; but others have an almost devouring passion for "deeds," and are ever concerting some new method of waging their strange guerilla against "princes, proprietors, and parsons." When a new method is discovered, a new club is sometimes formed to carry it out. For instance, the Anti-propriétaires, which is said to be one of the best organized of the anarchist clubs, bind their members (1) to pay no house-rent—rent, of course, being theft, and theft being really restitution; and (2) if the landlord at length resorts to law against any of them for this default, to come to their brother's help and remove his furniture to safer quarters before the moment of execution. The group La Panthère, to which Louise Michel belongs, and which has 500 members, and the group Experimental Chemie, as their names indicate, prefer less jocular methods. The best known of the anarchists are old Communards like Louise Michel herself and Élisée Reclus, the geographer.

The third section of the Havre Congress contained the majority of the 119 delegates, and they formed themselves into the Socialist Revolutionary Party of France, with the programme already mentioned, which was carried on the motion of M. Jules Guesde.

This programme sets out with the declaration that all instruments of production must be transferred to the possession of the community, and that this can only result from an act of revolution on the part of the working class organized as an independent political party, and then it goes on to say that one of the best means of promoting this end at present was to take part in the elections with the following platform:—

A. Political.

1. Abolition of all laws restricting freedom of the press, of association, or of meeting, and particularly the law against the International Working Men's Association. Abolition of "work-books."

2. Abolition of the budget of public worship, and secularization of ecclesiastical property.

3. Abolition of national debt.

4. Universal military service on the part of the people.

5. Communal independence in police and local affairs.

B. Economic.

1. One day of rest in the week under legal regulation. Limitation of working day to eight hours for adults. Prohibition of the labour of children under fourteen, and limitation of work hours to six for young persons between fourteen and sixteen.

2. Legal fixing of minimum wages every year in accordance with the price of provisions.

3. Equality of wages of male and female labour.

4. Scientific and technical training for all children, as well as their support at the expense of society as represented by the State and the Communes.

5. Support of the aged and infirm by society.

6. Prohibition of all interference on the part of employers with the management of the relief and sustentation funds of the working classes, to whom the sole control of these funds should be left.

7. Employers' liability guaranteed by deposit by employers proportioned to number of workmen.

8. Participation of the workmen in drawing up factory regulations. Abolition of employer's claim to punish the labourer by fines and stoppages (according to resolution of the Commune of 27th April, 1871).

9. Revision of all agreements by which public property has been alienated (banks, railways, mines, etc.). The management of all State factories to be committed to the workmen employed in them.

10. Abolition of all indirect taxes, and change of all direct ones into a progressive income tax on all incomes above 3,000 francs.

11. Abolition of the right of inheritance, except in the line of direct descent, and of the latter in the case of fortunes above 20,000 francs.

At the congress of the party held at St. Etienne two years after this programme was adopted, M. Brousse, a medical practitioner in Paris, and a member of the Town Council, who had already shown signs of disputing the leadership of M. Guesde, carried by a vote of thirty-six to twenty-seven a motion for introducing some modifications, and the minority seceded and set up a separate organization. In spite of repeated efforts at reconciliation, the two sections of the French socialists have never united again or been able even to work together temporarily at an election. Besides personal jealousies, there are most important differences of tendency keeping them apart. The Guesdists accept the policy of Karl Marx as well as his economic doctrine: the universal revolution, and the centralized socialist State, as well as the theory of surplus value and the right to the full product of labour. The Broussists, on the other hand, believe in decentralization, and would prefer municipalizing industries to nationalizing them. They are for giving the commune control of its own police, its own soldiers, its own civil administration, its own judiciary; and they think the régime of collective property can be best brought in and best carried on by local bodies. They would have the towns take over their own gas, light, and water supply, their omnibus and tramway traffic; but they would have them take over also many of the common industries which never tend towards monopoly or even call for any special control. They would municipalize, for example, the bakehouses and the mealshops and the granaries, apparently as supplying the necessaries of life, and they would have various other branches of industry undertaken by the towns to a certain limited extent, in order to provide suitable work for the unemployed. Then in 1887 they added a fresh plank to their platform, and asked for the establishment by municipalities, on public money or credit, of productive associations to be owned—not, like the other undertakings, by the municipality, but—by the working men employed in them. This is a reappearance of the old policy of Lassalle, with the difference that the productive associations are to be founded on municipal and not on State credit; and the reappearance is not surprising in France, because co-operative production has, on the whole, been more successful in that country than in any other. Then another of their demands is, that all public contracts should be subjected to such conditions as to wages and hours of labour as the workmen's syndicates approve; and in Paris they have already succeeded in obtaining this concession from the Town Council so far as municipal contracts are concerned. These workmen's syndicates are trade unions, which aim only at bettering the position of their members without theoretical prepossessions, but are quite as bold in their demands on the public powers as the socialists, and apparently more successful. In 1885 their claims included, not only an eight hours' day and a normal rate of fair wages, but the fixing of all salaries under 500 francs, a credit to themselves of 500,000,000 francs, and the gratuitous use of empty houses by their members; and in 1886 they obtained from the Town Council of Paris a furnished room, with free lighting and firing, and a subvention of 20,000 francs, for the establishment of a Labour Bureau, to be a centre for all working-class deliberations and intelligence, and a registry for the unemployed.

The socialism of the Broussists is thus practically a municipal socialism: municipal industries, municipal credit for working men's productive associations, municipal concessions to trade unions; but all this seems to the Guesdists to be mere tinkering, to be no better than the possibilities of the Republican Socialist Alliance, and they have for that reason given their rivals the name of Possibilists, which for distinction's sake they still commonly bear. Neither section had any representative in the Chamber of Deputies till 1889, when the Broussists succeeded in returning M. Joffrin; but the Broussists have nine in the Town Council of Paris. The Guesdists have more men of culture among them; Guesde himself and Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law, are both men of ability and public position; but they have a smaller following, and what they have is on the decline. Their sympathy with the principles of German Socialism, their alliance with the German Socialist party is against them, for the French working men have a very honest hatred of the Germans, both from recollections of the war and from the pressure of German industrial competition; and the feeling seems to be returned by the Germans, for it appeared even among the socialists at the recent congress at Halle, international and non-patriotic as socialists often claim to be. One of the personal accusations that disturbed the sittings of that congress was, that the leaders of the party had been discovered in secret conference with the delegates of the French socialists, MM. Guesde and Ferroul, who had been sent to greet their German comrades.

The Possibilists have no very eminent members, the most leading persons among them being Brousse himself and MM. Allemane and Joffrin. But they are not inconsiderable in number, and they are growing. They have 400 Circles of Social Studies all over the country, organized into six regions, each with its regular regional congress, and all working under a national executive committee and a general national congress, meeting once a year. The future of French socialism seems to be with the Possibilists rather than the Guesdists; and the future of the Possibilists, like the future of the German socialists, seems to lie in the direction of releasing their limbs from the dead clothes of socialist theory, in order to take freer and more practical action for the positive wellbeing of the working class. At the recent congress of the Possibilists at Châtellèrault in October, 1890, the chief questions discussed were the reform the system of poor relief and the eight hours' day. They want an international eight hours' day, but they would be willing to allow other four hours' overtime, to be paid for by double wages.

In 1885 the two divisions of socialists combined for electioneering purposes with one another and with a third revolutionary body called the Blanquists, and they actually formed together an organization known as the Revolutionary Union; but the three parties quarrelled again before the election, and the union was dissolved. The Blanquists are disciples of the veteran conspirator Blanqui, and include some well-known men, such as General Eudes, and MM. Vaillant and Roche. They are revolutionists pure and simple, and in some respects stand near the anarchists; only, being old birds, they move about more cautiously, and indeed are sometimes for that reason—and because they act as intermediaries between other revolutionaries—called the "diplomatists of lawlessness." With all their love for revolution, however, they have more than the usual democratic aversion to war, and their chief work at present is in connection with the league they have founded against permanent armies.

Although revolutionary socialism is so ill represented in the French Legislature, there is a special parliamentary party, known as the Socialist Group, which was founded by nineteen deputies in 1887, and returned thirty candidates to the Chamber at the election of 1889. They are for communal autonomy; for the transformation of industrial monopolies into public services, to be directed by the respective companies under the control of the public administration; and for the progressive nationalization of property, so as to make the individual employment of it accessible to free labourers; and they have no lack of other planks in their platform: international federation and arbitration; abolition of standing armies; abolition of capital punishment; universal suffrage; minority representation; sexual equality; free education, primary, secondary, and technical; suppression of the budget of public worship; separation of Church and State; absolute liberty to think, speak, write, meet, associate, and contract; abolition of indirect taxes and customs, and introduction of a progressive income tax, and a progressive succession duty; public crêches; establishment of superannuation, sick and accident insurance at public expense. Among the deputies who signed the programme in 1887 were the two Boulangists, MM. Laisant and Laur, and MM. Clovis Hughes, Basley, Bower, etc. The idea of the party seems to be what M. Laisant recommends in his "L'Anarchie Bourgeoise," published in the same year 1887, a Republican Socialist party, which, accepting the good works of socialism, without caring for its political or economic theory, shall do its best to abolish misery by any means open to it under the existing republican form of government. Republican socialism corresponds therefore to what is called State socialism in Germany—the abolition of poverty by means of the power of the present State; and the question between socialists and other reformers is narrowing in France, as elsewhere, into a question of the justice and the suitability of the individual measures proposed.

There is also a body of Christian Socialists in France, of whom, however, I shall have more to say in a subsequent chapter on the Christian Socialists.

Socialism crossed very early from Prussia into Austria and took quick root among the German-speaking population, but has never to this day made much way among any of the other nationalities in the Empire. The Magyars are, on the whole, fairly comfortable and contented in their worldly circumstances, and they have a strong national aversion to anything German, even a German utopia; so that they lent no ear to the socialist agitation till 1880, when a socialist congress of 119 delegates was held at Buda Pest and founded the Hungarian Labour Party. The agitation, however, has not assumed any important dimensions. The Poles of Austria, like the Poles of Russia and the Poles of Prussia, have all along been a source of much disappointment to socialist leaders, who expected they would leap into the arms of any revolutionary scheme, but find them too pre-occupied with their own nationalist cause to care for any other. The same observation applies to the Czechs. They are Czechs and Federalists first, and a social system under which they would cease to be Czechs and Federalists, and become mere atoms under a powerful centralized government, led possibly by Germans, is naturally not much to their fancy. But in the German-speaking part of the monarchy socialism has found a ready and general welcome, and has latterly grown most popular in the anarchist form. This development is due to various causes. The federalist ideas prevalent in the country would be a bridge to the general principles of anarchism, while the coercive laws in force since 1870 would naturally provoke a recourse to revolutionary methods and an impatience with the sober and Fabian policy of the Austrian Social Democrats. The Social Democrats of Austria were advised from the first by Von Schweitzer and Liebknecht, the leaders of German socialism at the time, to adopt this temporizing policy, as being on the whole the best for the party in the circumstances existing in their country. They were advised to give a general support at the elections to the Liberal party, because nothing could be done for socialism in Austria till the priestly and feudal ascendancy was abolished, and that could only be done by strengthening the hands of the Liberals. They have continued to observe this moderate course. Unlike their German comrades, they looked with favourable eyes on the labour legislation introduced by Government for improving the condition of the working classes; and though they have suffered from coercive legislation much longer and sometimes quite as severely, they have never struck the qualification "by legal means" out of their principles, but, on the contrary, have declared, when they were permitted to hold a meeting—as for example at Brünn in 1884—that they adhered entirely and exclusively to peaceful methods, and repudiated the deeds of the anarchists. But then they are apparently not prospering in number, while the anarchists are. For one thing they have never had good leaders, and though they sometimes invite Liebknecht or one of the German socialist leaders to come and rouse them, Government has always refused liberty for such addresses to be delivered in Austria. The anarchists, on the other hand, had an energetic and eloquent leader in Peukert, a house-painter, who is now a chief personage in anarchist circles in London, and from here no doubt still carries on relations with his old friends; and their propaganda seems to be spreading, if we judge from the political trials, and from the fresh measures of repression directed against it in 1884, when Vienna was put under siege, and again in the latter part of 1888. They have nine or ten newspapers, and the socialists six or seven. Neither faction has any representative in Parliament.

Both parties direct their chief attention to the peasantry, especially where any germ of an agrarian movement happens already to prevail. The Galician agitation against great landlords in 1886 was fomented by anarchist emissaries, and we occasionally hear of anarchist operations among the people of Northern Bohemia or Styria as well as in Upper Austria, where rural discontent has long been more or less acute. Austria is mainly an agricultural country; but greater part of the land is held in very large estates by the clergy and nobility, and the evils of the old feudal régime are only now being gradually removed. There are, it is true, as many as 1,700,000 peasant proprietors in the Cisleithanian half of the Empire alone; but then their properties are seriously encumbered by the debt of their redemption from feudal servitudes and by the severity of the public taxation. The land tax amounts to 26 per cent. of the proprietor's income, and the indirect taxes on articles of consumption are numerous and burdensome. But three-fourths of the rural population are merely farm servants or day labourers, and are worse off even than the same class elsewhere. The social question in Austria is largely agrarian, but the spontaneous movements of the Austrian peasantry seem rather unlikely to run in harness with social democracy. Unions of free peasants for example have sprung up of recent years in various provinces. Their great aim is to procure a reduction in the taxes paid by the peasantry; but then they add to their programme the principle of State-help to labour, the abolition of all feudal privileges and all rights of birth, gratuitous education, and cessation of the policy of contracting national debt, and they speak vaguely about instituting a peasant State, and requiring every minister and responsible official to serve an apprenticeship to peasant labour as a qualification for office, in order that he may understand the necessities and capacities of the peasantry. This idea of the peasant State is analogous to the idea of the labour State of the Social Democrats; but of course this is agreement which is really conflict. It is like the harmony between Sforza and Charles VIII.: "I and my cousin Charles are wonderfully at one; we both seek the same thing—Milan." The class interest of the landed peasant is contrary to the class interest of the working man, and would be invaded by social democracy. The peasantry are simply fighting for their own land, and as their votes are courted by both political parties they will probably be able to secure some mitigation of their grievances. Distress is certainly serious among them when, as happened a few years ago, in a parish of 135 houses as many as 35 executions were made in one day for failure to pay taxes, and in another of 250 houses as many as 72; but on the whole there seems to be little of that hopeless indigence which appears among the peasant proprietary in countries where the practice of unrestricted or compulsory subdivision of holdings exists, or has recently existed, to any considerable extent.

There is an influential Catholic Socialist movement in Austria, led by the clergy and nobility, and dealing in an earnest spirit with the social question as it appears in that country.

Socialism was introduced into Italy in 1868 by Bakunin, who, in spite of the opposition of Mazzini, gained wide acceptance for his ideas wherever he went, and founded many branches of the International in the country, which survived the extinction of the parent society, and continued to bear its name. They were, like Bakunin himself, anarchist in their social and political views, and were marked by an especial violence in their attacks on Church and State and family. They published a great number of journals of various sorts, and kept up an incessant and very successful propaganda; but no heed was paid them by the authorities till 1878, when an attempt on the life of the king led to a thorough examination being instituted into the whole agitation. The dimensions and ramifications of the movement were found to be so much more extensive than any one in power had anticipated, that it was determined to set a close watch thereafter on all its operations, and its meetings and congresses were then from time to time proclaimed. But after the passing of the Franchise Act of 1882, a new socialist movement came into being which looked to constitutional methods alone. The franchise was not reduced very low: it only gave a vote to one person in every fourteen, while in England one in six has a vote; but the reduction was accompanied with scrutin de liste and the ballot, and it was felt that something could now be done. Accordingly a new Socialist Labour Party was formed on the usual Marxist lines, under the leadership of a very capable man, an orator and a good organizer, Andrea Costa, who was formerly an anarchist. This party obtained 50,000 votes at the first subsequent election, and returned two candidates to the Legislature, one of them being Costa. In 1883 it formed a working alliance with the Italian Democratic Society—an active working-class body of which Costa was a leading member; and in 1884 it entered into an incorporating union with another working-class body, the Lombardy Labour Federation, which had a large number of local branches. With their help it had become, in 1886, an organization of 133 branches, and Government resolved to suppress it. Most of the branches in the north of Italy were dissolved, and their funds, flags, and libraries confiscated. But the party is still active over the country. They returned three members at the late election in November, 1890. The growth of this party was even more displeasing to the anarchists than to the Government, and in 1882 they called back Maletesta, one of their old leaders, from abroad, to conduct a regular campaign over the whole kingdom against Costa, and to denounce every man for a traitor to the socialist cause who should take any manner of part in parliamentary elections, or show the smallest sign of reconciliation to the existing order of things. His campaign ended in his arrest in May, 1883, and the condemnation of himself and 53 comrades to several years' imprisonment for inciting to disturbance of the public peace. Besides their contentions with the Socialist Labour Party, the Italian anarchists are much given to contending among themselves, and split up, even beyond other parties of the kind, upon trifles of doctrine or procedure. But however divided they may be, socialists and anarchists in Italy are all united in opposing the new social legislation of the Government. When the Employers' Liability Bill was introduced, Costa declared that legislation of that kind was utterly useless so long as the people were denied electoral rights, because till the franchise was reduced far enough to give the people a real voice in public affairs, there could be no security for the loyal and faithful execution of the provisions of such an act.

The Italian socialists and anarchists have always had a lively brood of journals, which, however, are generally shorter lived than even socialist organs elsewhere; but when one dies for want of funds to-day, another comes out in its place to-morrow. This remarkable fertility in journals seems to be due to the large literary proletariat that exists in Italy—the unemployed educated class who could live by their pen if they only had a paper to use it in. Through their presence among the socialists new journals are pushed forward without sufficient funds to carry them on, and as the people are too poor to subscribe to them, and the party too poor to subsidize them, they soon come to a natural termination.

The development of socialism in Italy is no matter of surprise. Though there is no great industry in the country, the whole population seems a proletariat. There is a distressed nobility, a distressed peasantry, a distressed working class, a distressed body of university men. Mr. Gallenga says that for six months of the year Italy is a national workshop; everybody is out of employment, and has to get work from the State; and he states as the reason for this, that the employing class wants enterprise and ability, and are apt to look to the Government for any profitable undertakings. The Government, however, are no better financiers than the rest, and the state of the public finances is one of the chief evils of the country. Taxation is very heavy, and yet property and life are not secure. "The peasants," says M. de Laveleye, "are reduced to extreme misery by rent and taxation, both alike excessive. Wages are completely inadequate. Agricultural labourers live huddled in bourgades, and obtain only intermittent employment. There is thus a rural proletariat more wretched than the industrial. Excluded from property by latifundia, it becomes the enemy of a social order that crushes it." The situation is scarcely better in parts of the country which are free from latifundia. In Sicily most of the agricultural population live on farms owned by themselves; but then these farms are too small to support them adequately, and their occupiers scorn the idea of working for hire. There are as many nobles in Sicily as in England, and Mr. Dawes (from whose report on Sicily to the Foreign Office in 1872 I draw these particulars states) that 25 per cent. of the lower orders are what he terms drones—idlers who are maintained by their wives and children. In Italy there is little working-class opinion distinct from the agricultural. There are few factories, and the artisans who work in towns have the habit of living in their native villages near by, and going and coming every day to their work. Two-thirds of the persons engaged in manufactures do so, or at least go to their rural homes from Saturday till Monday. Their habits and ways of thinking are those of agriculturists, and the social question of Italy is substantially the agricultural labourers' question. The students at the universities, too, are everywhere leavened with socialism. The advanced men among them seem to have ceased to cry for a republic, and to place their hope now in socialism. They have no desire to overturn a king who is as patriotic as the best president, and they count the form of government of minor importance as compared with the reconstitution of property. Bakunin thought Italy the most revolutionary country of Europe except Spain, because of its exceptionally numerous body of enthusiastic young men without career or prospects; and certainly revolutionary elements abound in the peninsula, but, as M. de Laveleye shrewdly remarks, a revolution is perhaps next to impossible for want of a revolutionary metropolis. "The malaria," he says, "which makes Rome uninhabitable for part of the year will long preserve her from the danger of becoming the seat of a new commune."

In Spain, as in Italy, socialism made its first appearance in 1868 through the agency of the International, and found an immediate and warm response among the people. In 1873 the International had an extensive Spanish organization with 300,000 members and 674 branches planted over the whole length and breadth of the country, from industrial centres like Barcelona to remote rural districts like the island of Majorca. M. de Laveleye was present at several sittings of these socialist clubs when he visited Spain in 1869, and he says: "They were usually held in churches erected for worship. From the pulpit the orators attacked all that had previously been exalted there—God, religion, the priests, the rich. The speeches were white hot, but the audience remained calm. Many women were seated on the ground, working, nursing their babes, and listening attentively as to a sermon. It was the very image of '93." He adds that their journals wrote with unparalleled violence, especially against religion and the Church.

On the division of the International in 1872 the Spanish members sided with Bakunin, supporting the anarchist view of the government of the future. This was natural for Spaniards, among whom their own central government had been long thoroughly detested, and their own communal organization regarded with general satisfaction. The Spanish people, even the humblest of them, are imbued beyond others with those sentiments of personal dignity and mutual equality which are at the bottom of democratic aspirations; and in their local communes, where every inhabitant who can read and write has a voice in public council, they have for ages been accustomed to manage their own affairs with harmony and advantage. The revolutionary tradition of Spain has accordingly always favoured communal autonomy, and the Federal rather than the Central Republic. Castelar declares the Federal Republic to be the most perfect form of State, though he thinks it for the present impracticable; and the revolution of 1873, in which the International played an active part, was excited for the purpose of establishing it. The Federal Republicans are not all socialists. Many of them are for making the agricultural labourers peasant proprietors, and even for dividing the communal property among them; but in a country like Spain, where communal property exists already to a large extent, the idea of making all other property communal property lies ever at hand as a ready resource of reformers. Nor, again, are all Spanish socialists federalists. There is a Social Democratic Labour party in Spain which broke off from the anarchists in 1882, and published a programme more on Marxist lines, demanding (1) the acquisition of political power; (2) the transformation of all private and corporate into the common property of the nation; and (3) the reorganization of society on the basis of industrial associations. This body is not very numerous, but at one of its recent congresses it had delegates from 152 different branches, and it has for the last four years had a party organ, El Socialista, in Madrid.

The bulk of Spanish socialism still belongs, however, to the anarchist wing. Little has been heard of the anarchists in Spain since the revolution of 1873 and the fall of the International. They have usually been blamed for the attempts on the life of the king in 1878, but they have certainly never resorted to those promiscuous outrages which have formed so much of the recent policy of the anarchists of other countries; and except for participation in a few demonstrations of the unemployed, they have maintained a surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive existence. In 1881 they reconstituted themselves as the Spanish Federation of the International Working Men's Association, which is said by the author of "Socialismus und Anarchismus, 1883–86," apparently on their own authority, to have 70,000 members in all Spain, who are distributed in 800 branches, and hold regular district and national congresses, but always under cover of secrecy. They have two journals in Madrid, and others in the larger towns elsewhere. They are sorely divided into parties and schools on very petty points, and fierce strife rages between the tweedledums and tweedledees. One party has broken away altogether and established a society of its own, under the name of the Autonomists. The anarchists are in close alliance with an agrarian organization called the Rural Labourers' Union, which has agitated since 1879 for the abolition of latifundia in Andalusia, but they always disclaim all connection with the more notorious Andalusian society, the Black Hand, which committed so many outrages in 1881 and 1882, and is often identified with the anarchists. The Black Hand is a separate organization from the anarchists, and has, it is said, 40,000 members, mostly peasants, in Andalusia and the neighbouring provinces; but their principles are undoubtedly socialistic. Their views are confined to the subject of land; but they declare that land, like all other property, has been made by labour, that it therefore cannot in right belong to the idle and rich class who at present own it, and that any means may be legitimately employed to deprive this class of usurpers of their possessions—the sword, fire, slander, perjury.

In Spain, unlike most other countries, the artisans of the towns show less inclination to socialistic views than the rural labourers. They have an active and even powerful labour movement of their own, carried on through an extensive organization of trade unions which has risen up rapidly within the last few years, especially in Catalonia, and they put their whole trust in combination, co-operation, and peaceful agitation for gradual reform under the present order of things, and will have nothing to say to socialism or anarchism; so much so, that they manifested the greatest reluctance to join in the eight hour demonstrations of May-day, 1890, because they did not wish to be confounded or in any way identified with the more extreme faction who were getting those demonstrations up; and they actually held a rival demonstration of their own on Sunday, the 4th of May, "in favour," as they stated in the public announcement of it, "of State socialism and of State legislation, both domestic and international, to improve the general condition of the working classes without any revolutionary or sudden change that could alarm the Sovereign and the governing classes."

Spain made a beginning in factory legislation in 1873, when an act was passed restricting the labour of children and young people; but the act remained dead-letter till 1884, when the renewal of agitation on the social question by the various parties led the cabinet to issue an order to have this law carried into effect, and a little later in the same year to appoint a royal commission to institute a thorough inquiry into the whole circumstances of the labouring classes, and the conditions of their improvement. This commission, which received nothing but abuse from the anarchists, who said the labour problem must be settled from below and not from above, was welcomed very heartily by the trade unionists, and with favour rather than otherwise even by the Social Democrats; but it has as yet had little or no result, and men who know the country express their opinion very freely that it will never lead to anything but an act or two that will remain dead-letter like their predecessors. The suffrage is high, only one person in seventeen having a vote; and working-class legislation will continue lukewarm till the working class acquires more real political power. A leading Spanish statesman said lately: "The day for social questions has not yet come in Spain, and we can afford to look on and see other countries make experiments which may be of use some day when our politicians and thinkers can find time to devote attention to these twentieth century problems."

There seems much truth in the view that socialism, spite of the alarm its spread caused to the Spanish Government in 1872, is really a disease of a more advanced stage of industrial development than yet exists in Spain, and therefore unlikely to grow immediately into anything very formidable there. The country has few large industrial centres. Two-thirds of the people are still engaged in agriculture; and though it is among the agricultural classes socialism has broken out, the outbreak has been local, and confined to provinces where the conditions of agricultural labour are decidedly bad. But these conditions vary much from province to province. In the southern provinces the cereal plains and also the lower pasturages are generally possessed by large proprietors, who work them by farmers on the metayer principle, with the help of bands of migratory labourers in harvest time; but in the mountainous parts of these provinces the estates belong for the most part to the communes. They are usually large, and as every member of the commune has an undivided right of using them, he is able to obtain from them the main part of his living without rent. Many of the inhabitants of such districts engage in the carrying trade, to which they conjoin a little cattle-dealing as opportunities offer; and as they are sober and industrious, they are usually comparatively well off. In the northern provinces the situation is in some respects better. Land is much subdivided, and though the condition of the labouring class is not as a rule unembarrassed, that result is due more to their own improvidence and indolence than to anything else. A man of frugal and industrious habits can always rise without much difficulty from the position of day labourer to that of metayer tenant, and from tenancy to proprietorship, and some of the small proprietors are able to amass a considerable competency. Besides, even the improvident are saved from the worst by the communal organization. They have always a right of pasturage on the commons, and a right to wood for fire, house and furniture, and they get their children's education and medical attendance in sickness gratuitously on condition of giving six days' labour at the roads of the commune. The most active and saving part of the population, north and south, is the class of migratory workmen, who stay at home only during seed-time and harvest, and go for the rest of the year to work in Castile, Andalusia, or Portugal, as masons or carpenters, or waiters, and always come back with a store of money. Sometimes they remain abroad for a year or two, and sometimes they go to Cuba or Mexico for twenty years, and return to settle on a property of their own in their native village. This class forms the personnel of the small property in Spain, and they give by their presence a healthy stimulus to the neighbourhoods they reside in. The small property is in Spain, as elsewhere, too often turned from a blessing to a curse by its subdivision, on the death of the proprietor, among the members of his family, who in Spain are usually numerous, though it is interesting to learn that in some of the Pyrenean valleys it has been preserved for five hundred years by the habit of integral transmission to the eldest child—son or daughter—coupled with the habit of voluntary celibacy on the part of many of the other children. The economic situation of Spain, then, is not free from defects; but there always exists a wide margin of hope in a country where, as Frere said, "God Almighty has so much of the land in His own holding," and its economic situation would not of itself be likely to precipitate social revolution.

From Spain, socialism passed into Portugal; but from the first it has worked very quietly there. Its adherents formed themselves into an association in 1872, and held congresses, published newspapers, started candidates, and actively promoted their views in every legitimate way. Their programme was anarchism, like that of their Spanish allies; but, unlike anarchists elsewhere, they repudiated all resort to violence, for, as M. de Laveleye says, they are naturally "less violent than the Spaniards, the economic situation of the country is better, and liberty being very great, prevents the explosion of popular fury, which is worse when exasperated by repression." Portugal is an agricultural country in a good climate, where the people have few wants, and find it easy to satisfy them fairly well. In the absence of any manner of acute discontent, socialism could never have been much better than an abstract speculation; and Portuguese socialism, if we may trust the complaints made by the party elsewhere, seems now to have lost even the savour it had. In March, 1888, one of the socialist newspapers of London reported that the Portuguese working men's movement had, in the course of the preceding ten years, given up the straightforward socialist character it once had; that its leaders had entered into compromises with other political parties, and threw themselves too much into experiments in co-operation; that the party press was very lukewarm in its socialism, and inclined more to mere Radicalism; and that one or two attempts that had been made to start more extreme journals had completely failed; but it announced with satisfaction, that at last, in January, 1888, a frankly anarchist paper was published at Oporto—A Revoluzao Social. About the same time the editor of a journal which had made some hostile remarks on anarchism was shot, and anarchists were blamed and arrested for the deed. There was a Socialist Congress at Lisbon in 1882, composed of twelve delegates representing eight societies, all in Lisbon or Oporto.

While the socialist cause has been thus rather retreating in the south of Europe, it has been making some advances in the north. Of the three Scandinavian countries, Denmark alone gave any early response to the socialist agitation; but there are now socialist organizations in Sweden and Norway, and the movement in Denmark has assumed considerable dimensions. Attempts were made to introduce socialism into Norway as far back as 1873 by Danish emissaries, and the International also founded a small society of thirty-seven members in Christiania; but the society seems to have died, and nothing more was heard of socialism there till the commotion in favour of a Republic in 1883. A Social Democratic Club was then established in Christiania, and a Social Democratic Congress was held at Arendal in 1887; but even yet Norwegian social democracy is of so mild a character that it would be counted conservatism by Social Democrats elsewhere, for this Congress issued a programme for a new labour party without a word of socialism in it, and merely asking for a normal working day, for factory legislation and reform of taxation. In Sweden there is more appearance of agitation, because there is one very active agitator in the country, Palm, a tailor, who keeps socialism en evidence by making stump speeches, or getting up street processions with the usual red flags, and sometimes—such was the easy indifference of the Government to his work at first—with a military band in full uniform at the head of them. The Swedish socialists had four newspapers in 1888, but three of them were confiscated by the Government in December of that year, and their editors arrested for offences against religion and the throne. In May, 1890, they held their first Congress at Stockholm, when delegates appeared from twenty-nine unions; but the movement is very unimportant in Sweden and Norway, and the chief conditions of success seem wanting to it in those countries. There is no class of labourers there without property; no town residuum, and no rural cottagers. There being few great manufacturers in the kingdom, only fifteen per cent. of the people altogether live in towns. The rest are spread sparsely over the rural districts on farms belonging to themselves, and in the absence of roads are obliged to make at home many of the ordinary articles of consumption. What with the produce of their small properties and their own general handiness, they are unusually independent and comfortable. M. de Laveleye considers them the happiest people in Europe.

The circumstances of Denmark are different. The operatives of the town are badly off. Mr. Strachey tells us in his report to the Foreign Office in 1870 that every fourth inhabitant of Copenhagen was in receipt of parochial relief in 1867, and he says that while the Danish operatives are sober, and well educated, they fail in industry and thrift. "No fact in my report," he states, "is more certain than that the Dane has yet to learn the meaning of the word work; of entireness and thoroughness he has seldom any adequate notion. This is why the Swedish artisan can so often take the bread from his mouth." In the rural districts, too, the economic situation, though in some respects highly favourable, is attended by a shadow. The land is, indeed, widely diffused. There are in all 280,000 families in the rural districts of Denmark, and of these 170,000 occupy independent freeholds, 30,000 farm hired land, and only 26,000 are agricultural labourers pure and simple. Seven-eighths of the whole country is held by peasant proprietors, and as a rule no class in Europe has improved more during the last half century than the Danish peasant or Bonde. Mr. Strachey says: "The Danish landlord was till recent times the scourge of the peasantry. Under his paternal care the Danish Bonde was a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water; his lot was no better than that of the most miserable ryot of Bengal. The Bonde is now the freest, the most politically wise, the best educated of European yeomen." But there is another side to the picture. In Denmark, as in other places where the small property abounds, the property is often too small for the proprietor's necessities, and there thus arises a kind of proprietor-proletariat, unwilling to part with their land and unable to extract a living out of it. This class, along with the rural labourers who have no property, constitute a sort of fourth estate in the country, and there as elsewhere their condition is preparing a serious social question for the future. Then, among the influences favourable to the acceptance of socialism in Denmark, must be counted the fact that one of the two great political parties of the country is democratic. Curiously enough that party consists of the peasantry, and the Conservatives of Denmark are the commercial classes of the towns, with the artisans in their wake, their Conservatism, however, being substantially identical with the Liberalism of the same classes in other countries. This democratic party seeks to make everything in the State conduce to the interests of the peasantry, and keeps alive in the country the idea that the State exists by the will of the people, and for their good alone.

The International was introduced into this exclusively Protestant country by two militant Roman Catholics—Pio, a retired military officer, who came to Denmark as religious tutor to a baroness who had joined the Church of Rome, and Geleff, who wrote for an Ultramontane journal. They pursued their new mission with great zeal and success. They opened branches of the association in most of the towns, started a party newspaper, held open-air meetings, were sent to imprisonment for sedition in 1873, and on their release in 1877 absconded to America with the whole of the party funds, and disputed bitterly there over the spoil. While they were in prison, the International was suppressed in Denmark; but the members merely reconstituted the organization under the name of the Socialist Labour Party, and the place of leader was taken for a time by an authoress, Jacquette Lilyenkrantz, for, as in other countries, women are in Denmark among the most active propagandists of socialism. They kept up communications with the socialist leaders in Germany, and the meeting of the German Socialist Congress at Copenhagen in 1883 gave the movement a new impetus. They were able to return two deputies, Holm and Hördun, to the Volkething in 1884, and they took part, 80,000 strong, in the Copenhagen procession of 1886, in commemoration of the fundamental law of the State. Their chief party organ, the Social Demokraten, has a circulation of 26,000 daily, one of the largest newspaper circulations in Denmark; and there are other four socialist journals in the kingdom.

They belong to the moderate wing of social democracy, being opposed to revolution and terrorism, and placing their confidence in constitutional agitation. Their programme is substantially that of Gotha—the right of the labourers to the full product of labour, State management of all industry, free education, universal suffrage, normal working day, abolition of class inequalities, single chamber in legislature, free justice, no standing army, State provision for sick and aged, religions to be a private affair. They turn their propaganda with most hope to the land proletariat; and a recent writer, P. Schmidt, in an interesting paper in the Arbeiterfreund for 1889, says they are succeeding in their mission, and that socialism is spreading more and more every day among the rural labourers. At their last Congress, held at Copenhagen, in June, 1890, and attended by seventy-one delegates from fifty-four different branches, their attention was chiefly occupied with questions about the land; provision of more land for the people by compulsory acquisition of ecclesiastical property and uncultivated ground; State advances of capital to agricultural labourers; agricultural schools; better housing for farm servants, etc. In 1887 they held a socialist exhibition in Copenhagen—an international exhibition of socialist pamphlets, newspapers, books, magazines, and pictures; and in 1890 they returned two members to the Landthing—the first time they secured representatives in the Upper Chamber.

Belgium has many of the conditions of soil most favourable for socialism—a dense population, large towns, an advanced productive system, and an industrial class at once very numerous, very ill paid, and very open, through their education, to new social ideas. For a time, accordingly, socialism spread remarkably in that country. The International had eight federations of branches in 1869, with 60,000 members and several newspapers. In the dispute between Marx and Bakunin, the Belgian Internationalists seem to have sided as a body with Bakunin; but they presently fell out among themselves, and, in spite of many repeated efforts at reconciliation, they have never since succeeded in composing their differences. The German socialist leaders tried to reorganize them in 1879 at a special Congress at Brussels, under the name of the Socialist Labour Party of Belgium, and with the Gotha programme; but they were rent again in 1881 by a division which had then entered into German socialism itself. The majority of the party adhered to Liebknecht and Bebel; but an active minority, composed chiefly of Walloons, followed the anarchist views of Most and Hasselman, withdrew from the party, and founded another called the Revolutionary Union. The anarchists have one journal—Ni Dieu, Ni Maître—violent, as the name indicates, but obscure and unimportant; but they believe most in the less intellectual propaganda of deed, and make themselves conspicuous from time to time by dynamite explosions and street fights with the police or the military, or their own socialist rivals. The Belgian socialists, on the other hand, look more to constitutional and parliamentary action, and usually work with the Liberals at the elections; but the Belgian voting qualification is high, and they have never succeeded in returning a candidate of their own. In 1887 their candidate for Brussels got 1,000 votes, while his successful rival had 3,000. They took an active part in the Republican agitation which was raised by the School Law in 1884. They have capable leaders, and they publish two journals, which, however, for want of funds, appear only at distant and uncertain intervals. They have lately begun to hold many open-air meetings, which the authorities had long forbidden, and they held an International Socialist Exhibition at Ghent in 1887 like that held in the same year at Copenhagen.

On the whole socialism, after twenty years' work, is making no way in Belgium, notwithstanding the favourable character of the soil, because the labour movement is choosing other directions and forms of organization. Trade unions and co-operative societies have been multiplying much during these twenty years, and in 1885 a strong Belgian Labour Party was formed, with 120 branches and 100,000 members, which aims at promoting the practical wellbeing of the working class by remedial legislation—by in some cases vicious State-socialistic legislation, it may be—but has no word of the right to the full product of labour, of the nationalization of all industry, or of the social revolution. One of the items of the programme is worded "collective property"; but whether it contemplates the universal State-property of collectivism or the corporate property of co-operation does not appear. The other items are universal suffrage, direct legislation by the people (presumably the referendum), free undenominational education, abolition of standing army, abolition of budget of worship, normal work day, normal wages, regulation of work of women and children, factory inspection, employers' liability, workmen's chambers, courts of conciliation, repeal of taxes on means of subsistence, increased income tax, international labour legislation. M. de Laveleye attributes the ill success of socialism in Belgium, and no doubt rightly, to the influence of discussion and free institutions. Government has left it to stand or fall on its own merits before public opinion. The socialists enjoy full liberty of the platform and press; they can hold meetings and congresses and form clubs in any town they please, and the result is that though the movement, like all new movements, made a certain impression and advance for a time at first, it got checked under the influence of discussion and the application of solid practical judgment. Then, though the Belgian Legislature has not yet done what it can and ought for ameliorating the condition of the labourers, philanthropy has been very active and useful in a number of ways in that kingdom. The Catholic Church has always intervened to keep up a high ideal of employers' responsibility—the old ideal of a patriarchal care; and there is a strong organization in Belgium of Catholic Working Men's Clubs, which were formed into one body in 1867, which were united with the Catholic Working Men's Clubs of Germany in 1869, and with those of France in 1870, and which now constitute with these the International Catholic Working Men's Association.

It ought perhaps to be mentioned that there is an old but small party of Land Nationalizers in Belgium, the Colinsian Socialists, whose principles have been warmly endorsed by Mr. Ruskin as "forming the most complete system of social and political reform yet put forward." They want the State to own all the soil, and let it out by auction; but they are opposed to nationalizing any of the other instruments of production.

In Holland, wealth is very unequally divided, wages are low, and taxation, being largely indirect, falls heavily on the working class; but the people are phlegmatic, domestic, religious, and contrive on small means to maintain a general appearance of comfort and decency. Above all, they enjoy free institutions; and, under freedom, socialism has run the same course in Holland as in Belgium. The International made rapid advances in 1869, founded branches in all the towns, and carried on, after the Paris Commune, so active and successful an agitation that the bourgeoisie took alarm, and Government imposed some restrictions on the disaffected press. But a general rise in wages happened about the time, a strong co-operative movement was promoted under the lead of the orthodox divines, a lively polemic against socialism broke out among the working men themselves, and all interest in the social revolution seemed to have died away, when, in 1878, it was revived again by D. Niewenhuis, a retired Protestant minister, a man of capacity and zeal, who has been unwearied in his advocacy of the cause ever since. He started in that year a journal, Recht Voor Allen, which is still, I believe, the only socialist organ in Holland, and appears now three times a week; and he founded the Social Democratic Union in 1884, which is strongest in the Hague and Amsterdam, but has branches in most of the other towns, and a membership by no means inconsiderable, though much below the old numbers of the Dutch International. After being imprisoned in 1887 for political reasons, Niewenhuis was returned to the Legislature in 1888—the first socialist who has sat there. The Dutch Socialists, to increase their numbers, enrol a class of "secret" members, timid spirits who will only come to them "by night, for fear of the Jews." There is also a handful of anarchists in Holland, who have a newspaper in Amsterdam, and are said to live harmoniously with the socialists, and, according to the reports of the American consuls, nobody in the country thinks any harm of either.