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Most people seem to imagine that the present industrial system has existed from the beginning of all things. The arguments against a revolutionary change assume that no other system was, or ever can be, possible. Their contentions assume that without private landowners land could not be used, and without the private ownership of the tools of production labour would be unable to employ itself, or to use tools and machinery for the production of the necessaries of life. But the simple fact is that the present system of wealth ownership and production is a comparatively recent development, and during the far greater part of the time which man has been on this habitable globe they have lived and worked under very different conditions from those which prevail to-day. There exist to-day, in the several parts of the world, a great variety of systems of land ownership and tenure, and there are many communities still existing where the system of production and distribution of commodities is quite different from that which exists in the great commercial countries. Private land ownership, capitalist production for profit, with competition as the dominating principle, are institutions of comparatively recent origin, and they have in them no more promise of eternal life than the systems they have superseded.

Man is, owing to his physical needs, the slave of nature until he has acquired sufficient knowledge to subdue his master. The relation of an individual to his fellows has in all ages been largely determined by the economic conditions of the period. In a rude stage of intelligence, where the individual’s labour power was so small and his knowledge so limited, that he could produce or obtain by hunting or fishing only sufficient to support himself, it is manifest that there could be no such thing as slavery. It was when man’s labour power was more than enough to provide for his primary needs that the institution of slavery arose. Then the strong, in order to escape from the slavery to nature, enslaved his fellows, and compelled the slave to work for him. In that way the slave owner obtained freedom from nature slavery in regard to the supply of his physical needs. The value of associated labour was soon realised, and this gave birth to the tribal system of organisation which was based upon communism. There was economic freedom and personal liberty within the tribe; the tribe made war and raid upon other tribes to secure slaves, but within the tribe the bond of kinship preserved a social and economic equality.

But all through the ages tribes and nations have been obliged to modify their organisation and their mode of life when the environment has changed. Changed economic conditions brought a changed environment, and then there came a desire to adjust the individual and social life to the demands of the new environment. A revolution in the economic relations of classes was brought about by the downfall of the feudal system, and the overthrow of the Catholic Church and the distribution of its lands. The landlords were relieved from the national obligations which had hitherto been attached to the feudal tenure. The object of the landlord was now to get the highest return from the use of the land. The change turned tens of thousands of people from the land, and made them wanderers on the face of the earth,—thousands of them eventually being brought to the gibbet for begging. At the same time that these changes were taking place in connection with the land, a similar revolution was coming about in general industry. In the Middle Ages, trade not connected with agriculture was organised in guilds. There was not, as a general rule, such a thing as capitalist and wage-worker. The three degrees of apprentice, journeyman, and master were different stages in the career of the same person. But these guilds were overthrown and robbed by Henry VIII., and then a similar state of things to that brought to pass in connection with the land was gradually established—namely, capitalists served by wage labour.

About the end of the eighteenth century there came upon the country the greatest revolution this nation, or any nation, has ever known, and this revolution completed the work of divorcing the worker from the ownership of the tools of his trade which the changes of the two preceding centuries had partially done. This revolution was brought about by the discovery of the control of steam power and the invention of machinery. In the short space of a generation the methods of wealth production were completely revolutionised. It is the changes brought by this Industrial Revolution which have made Socialism necessary and inevitable. Socialism is the way by which ‘the nation under the pressure of its environment will respond to the demands of that environment.’ This Industrial Revolution broke up the hand crafts and the individual system of production. It transferred the workshop from the home to the factory, from the village to the town. It changed production from an individual operation to a social function, without harmonising the ownership of the tools and the product with the changed method of work. It widened the market from the locality where the hand producer exchanged his products with his neighbours to a worldwide market. It took away from the workman his former control over his own actions; he was no longer the master of his own life and work; his hours of labour were fixed not by him but for him. He who had made his own goods in his own way, and put his individuality into his work, was made a mere machine-minder, ever under the orders and the eye of an overseer. Regularity of employment was gone, at one time he was working day and night, and then he had to endure a long spell of unemployment. Competition had now become deified as the ruling principle of trade. This competition regulated not only the price of goods but the value of human life and labour. While the productivity of labour was thus being enhanced beyond all dreams, wages were forced down, the standard of living was degraded, and the cheaper labour of women and children was brought in to tend the new machines. The workhouses were emptied. Children of eight and six years of age were worked in factories and coal mines from twelve to sixteen hours a day. There was no such thing as regulation of labour; there was no attention to sanitation. There was no educational system. The workman, his wife, and his children were whirled round giddily in this maelstrom, until they were finally sucked and overwhelmed.

The Elizabethan statutes which had fixed wages and limited the number of apprentices were found by the employers to be inconsistent with the exercise of the freedom they desired to exploit the new opportunities, and they were repealed by Parliament. But while any advantage which the workers might have derived from the fixing of a legal wage by the justices was taken away, the Combination Laws remained, and penalised any attempt on the part of two or more workmen to join together to raise their wages, or to interfere in any way with the freedom of unrestricted competition to fix wages. This period is the most awful in the industrial and social history of the British working-class. The history of the period is one long record of the constant persecution of the workers and the unmerciful repression of their efforts at political and social improvement. But it was the El Dorado of the unscrupulous capitalist. The wealth of the country increased in twenty years of this period by two thousand millions of pounds. The profits were so enormous that the employer begrudged every moment the machinery was idle. This country had a world market at its feet, and the contemporary invention of the railway engine and the steamship made its exploitation more easy. The commercial greatness of Britain was built up in those days by an industrial slavery worse than any chattel slavery the world had ever known,—worse in its actual deeds, infinitely worse because it was glorified as individual liberty. It seemed at this period as if Nature, wroth that her secrets had been taken from her, had invoked the help of some malignant spirit who had turned the forces of Nature which man had enslaved against man himself.

This was the condition of things which had been created by the Industrial Revolution, and contemporary there had been brought about a no less striking and important revolution of ideas, largely by the teachings of the French philosophers. This mental revolution expressed itself in the French Revolution, which was a revolt against the tyranny and rottenness of the French aristocracy. This Revolution exalted Reason to the throne and had Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for its watchwords. The working-classes of Great Britain were impressed by the new ideas which had produced so profound an impression in France, and for a long time after the Revolution these ideas influenced the political thought and actions of the British working-classes. With such ideas of the equality of men and of liberty abroad, and with industrial conditions so opposed to such ideas, it was but natural that theories should be advanced and schemes propounded for the reorganisation of industry and society in accordance with the new conception of social theories and popular rights.

Modern Socialism in its first crude form arose simultaneously in England and in France about the year 1817. Although the pioneers of Socialism in both countries were influenced by both the industrial and mental movements of the time, yet owing to the more highly developed and acute industrialism of Great Britain, early English Socialism was more directly the creature of industrialism, while French Socialism was more philosophic. The first French Socialist was Count Henri Saint-Simon, who belonged to the ducal family of that name. He seems to have obtained his ideas for a reorganised society by the contemplation of the decrepit and useless feudal system of France, which no longer controlled society nor rendered any useful social service, but was a parasite on the new industrialism which was then developing in France. From the contemplation of the past history and social functions of feudalism, Saint-Simon conceived the idea of a reorganised society in which the feudal lords should be supplanted by industrial chiefs, and society should be an industrial State directed by modern science under the authority of these industrial managers. There was little democracy in the theories of Saint-Simon. He would have an aristocracy of ability who should be the rulers. It was the paternalism of feudalism applied to industrialism. There is nothing in the writings of Saint-Simon about the essential antagonism between the interests of classes, which is the leading idea in the Socialist theories of later Socialists. He reduces the divine element in Christianity to the simple precept that men should act towards each other as brethren, and he demands that temporal institutions should all be established on that principle. He regarded the existence of a poor class as immoral, and desired that society should be organised in such a way as to best attain the amelioration of the physical and moral condition of the poor. During his lifetime, Saint-Simon made little impression with his views. He left at his death, however, a few disciples, among whom were some men of brilliant parts, who by the advocacy of these ideas soon gathered together some of the ablest young men then in Paris. Under the inspiration of these recruits the theories of Saint-Simon were elaborated, and we begin to see in the teachings of the followers of Saint-Simon the germs of some of the theories of later Socialist writers. They pointed out that the character of an epoch depends upon the extent to which the spirit of social antagonism or social association prevails. They proclaim that the spirit of association is to be the factor in the social development of the future, and that instead of the exploitation of man by man there must be the exploitation of the globe by men associated together. To these sound social theories, the followers of Saint-Simon added some heterodox views on theology; and in regard to the family and the relations of the sexes, they advocated the complete emancipation of woman and her equality with man. There was much that was good, and a great deal that was crude, in the ideas of Saint-Simon and his school. But it must be remembered that they were pioneers in an untrodden land, and that the great social problem which had to be solved had not in their day fully unfolded itself.

On the decline of Saint-Simonism the theories and suggestions of Fourier began to attract attention. The proposals of Fourier were fantastically Utopian, though in some respects based on sound principles. The lesson is constantly forcing itself upon the students of social theories that ideas which have been rejected when first propounded have afterwards to be taken up again, because it is found that there was a germ of truth in the centre of the scheme. In many respects, however, the ideas of Fourier were in opposition to nearly everything which is now regarded as a rule of social progress. He proposed the organisation of the people in small communities of 400 families, or 1800 persons living on a square league of land. These communities were to be self-supporting and self-contained, and they were to provide every means for the full and free development of individual capacities. Fourier was a voluntaryist. He hoped that private philanthropy would provide the means for the establishment of his first ‘phalange,’ and he was confident that its success would encourage others to be established, until such communities would cover the world. While retaining the full rights of local control, it was suggested that these communities would freely group themselves until a world-wide federation was formed. The value of Fourier’s work is in its incisive criticism of existing society, and especially in his recognition of the place of the free local group in any scheme of social organisation; and in the recognition of the need for providing safeguards against possible tyranny either inside or from outside the group.

Up to this time these social theories had appealed to the educated classes only. But about 1830, Socialism passed from the academic stage into the political life of France. In 1830 in France, and in 1832 in Great Britain, the middle-classes were enfranchised. Up to this time they and the working-classes had fought together against the aristocracy, and for political enfranchisement. But the exclusion of the working-classes from political rights by these Reform Acts, left the working-class in the position of being the one distinct class of political outcasts, and put the middle-class among the privileged and ruling powers. This made the working-classes conscious of their position as a class apart from the landlord and commercial classes, and the outcome was the formation of working-class political parties. In England the movement took the form of Chartism; in France, political Socialism. Paris became the centre of European social fermentation.

With Louis Blanc, Socialism is first brought into association with the political life of France. In the history of the Socialist movement of this period, we recognise features with which we are familiar to-day. Louis Blanc had a clearer understanding of the social question and made more valuable contributions to social theories than perhaps any of the great leaders who immediately followed him. He saw something of the stupendous nature of the work of social reorganisation which had to be accomplished. He saw that no force less than the power of the State could undertake such a task. He demanded, therefore, the democratic organisation of the State as the first step towards economic and industrial reform. He pointed out that the social reformers must have the State, the law, and the army on their side, for if not with them these forces would be against them. Therefore the first step was for the proletariat to seize political power, and to use that political power to gradually reorganise society under the credit of the State. The Revolution of 1848 established the legislature in France on the basis of popular government. In the Provisional Government which followed the Revolution Louis Blanc obtained a seat, hoping to have an opportunity of beginning to establish his schemes of Government workshops. But the Government was not favourable to his proposals. A number of workshops were opened, but it is made clear in the Report of the Committee of Inquiry which was afterwards appointed that these workshops were deliberately started for the purpose of discrediting Louis Blanc’s proposals. But the fact that, even under such circumstances, some of these workshops did succeed, is evidence that the idea had in it the possibilities of success. To Louis Blanc belongs the credit of having first recognised the need for working-class solidarity, and the part that political action must play in bringing about the reorganisation of society on Socialist lines,—ideas which were afterwards greatly elaborated by Marx, and made the basis of his school of Socialism.

Proudhon was a contemporary of Louis Blanc. In his writings we have a further advance in the development of Socialist theory. He was an economist, and he tried to do for political economy what Ruskin did at a later time—namely, to suffuse economic theories with the principles of justice and liberty. He opposed much of the Socialism of his time as being Utopian and imaginative. He declared that society must be established on scientific principles, and that science is not a thing we have to invent from our imaginations, but is a thing which exists and which we have to discover. Proudhon in economics, like Louis Blanc in politics, ridiculed the idea of reforming society except by a long process of gradual change. He wisely distinguished between transition and perfection, and while declining to forecast what the final form of society would be, he advocated as transition reforms the taxation of rent and interest, and the co-operative organisation of industry. Proudhon’s writings distinctly advanced Socialism as a social system based on science.

In the year 1816, the year before Saint-Simon issued his first Socialist writings, Robert Owen laid before a Committee of the House of Commons his proposals for the establishment of industrial communities. That Report was issued in 1817. Robert Owen derived his Socialist ideas from his experience of the Industrial Revolution. At the age of nineteen he was manager of a Manchester cotton mill, and by his organising skill he made it one of the first concerns in the trade. He settled down later near Glasgow, and he afterwards related that it was the sight of the awful condition of the factory people that first turned his attention to social questions. He wondered how it was that this body of 2000 workers who were turning out as much wealth in cotton goods as would have needed the labour of 600,000 hand-workers a generation before were in such a deplorable condition, and were receiving none of the possible benefits of this increase in labour power. He pondered over that problem until he found the cause, and then he formulated his schemes of reform. Like Proudhon and Ruskin, he protested against the idea that human life should be sacrificed to the production of wealth. He recognised how hopeless it was to expect that a people so degraded and helpless could emancipate themselves without some preparatory amelioration of their lot by the help of others. His first efforts were philanthropic. He improved the housing, he established co-operative stores, which he encouraged the workmen to manage themselves as an education. But the work he did and the results he obtained are best told in his own words. Writing years after this, he said in a letter to The Times (1834): ‘For twenty-nine years we did without the necessity for magistrates or lawyers, without a single legal punishment, without any known poor’s rate, without intemperance, and without religious animosities. We reduced the hours of labour, well educated all the children from infancy, improved the condition of the adults, paid interest upon capital, and cleared upwards of £300,000 profit.’ The success of Owen’s work at social reform attracted worldwide attention. The results he achieved may not be set down to the credit of democratic Socialism, but they do at least support one important Socialist contention, and one which Owen was the first to put forward—namely, the great influence which environment has in forming character, and how necessary healthy conditions and rational opportunities are to make better human beings.

But Owen saw clearly that philanthropy would not solve the social problem. In the evidence he gave before the House of Commons Committee, he propounded his Socialist schemes. He recommended the establishment of communities very much on the lines of Fourier’s ‘phalange.’ His proposals were received with considerable favour when they first appeared, and there seemed a probability of their adoption tentatively, when at a public meeting in London he went out of his way to attack all the recognised forms of religion. At once his social schemes were associated with atheism, and in that intolerant age such a taint was enough to condemn any proposal. When the prospect of State help was gone, Owen set himself to establish such colonies himself. He sunk his fortune in two or three such schemes, none of which attained any measure of success. The reasons for the failures of Owen’s colonies are clear enough. His methods were not in harmony with the laws of social evolution. Men cannot be suddenly transferred to a new environment and at once adapt themselves to it. The new conditions must grow, and the men must grow with the new conditions.

The founding of ideal colonies has had an attraction for certain minds ever since the early Christians set the example, with results no more successful than have been achieved by any subsequent attempt. But this Utopia founding is not Socialism: it is the very negation of Socialism. The criticism of such schemes from the Socialist point of view has been admirably stated by Mr Sidney Webb.^[6] He says, ‘The authors of such schemes are often chided for their unbounded faith in human nature. To me, on the contrary, they seem to be throwing up the sponge in despair. Their disgust with the world of competition and industrialism, their impatience with the slow and gradual methods of democratic progress come really not from too much but too little faith in human nature.... The aim of the modern Socialist movement, I take it, is not to enable this or that comparatively free person to lead an ideal life, but to loosen the fetters of the millions who toil in our factories and mines, and who cannot possibly be moved to Freeland or Topolobampo.... Wise prophets nowadays do not found a partial community which adopts the whole faith; they cause rather the partial adoption of their faith by the whole community.’

Though Robert Owen appeared to fail during his lifetime, a later generation has realised the greatness of his work, and has appreciated the substantial contribution he made to human progress. He was a pioneer, and the work of pioneers is never to be judged by the work they themselves actually accomplish. But perhaps no man of the nineteenth century planted seed which has produced so rich a crop in after years as did Robert Owen. He was the founder of Infant Schools, the father of Factory Legislation, the founder of the Co-operative Movement; and he it was who by his agitation was mainly responsible for the passing of the Municipal Corporations Act of 1836, out of which has grown those magnificent monuments of local democratic government.

Contemporary with the later days of Owenism was the Chartist movement. Though prominently a demand for the political franchise, Chartism was in its ultimate aim an economic movement, and was the British counterpart of the Revolutionary agitation which at the same time was convulsing the continent of Europe. The literature and speeches of the Chartist movement were devoted far less to the political demand than to the expounding of economic theories, to the exposure of landlordism and capitalism, and to emphasising the point that the Charter was needed to obtain the control of political power, so that that possession might be used to establish industrial freedom. The analogy between the gospel of Chartism and that of the contemporary French Socialist movement under Louis Blanc was very close. The amelioration of the lot of the workers following upon the repeal of the Corn Laws and the passing of the Ten Hours Factory Act, together with the internal quarrels on policy between the political Chartists and the physical force Chartists (the Syndicalists of that day) caused the break up of the movement, and after its collapse the steadier section of the Chartists turned their attention to trade union organisation and to the co-operative movement, in which work they were aided by the enthusiastic band of Christian Socialists led by Maurice, Kingsley, and Ludlow.

After the Revolution of 1848, and the collapse of Chartism in England, Socialism for a time disappeared as an active movement in both France and Great Britain, and for the continuity of historic Socialism we have now to turn to Germany. After the French Revolution of 1848, there settled in the Rhine country a group of men who were destined to make a great impression upon the world’s political history. These men were Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Ferdinand Lassalle. In Lassalle the movement found its agitator and organiser; in Marx its scholar and teacher. About the time Lassalle came into political life (about 1862) there was no political party in Germany to which the democratic sentiment could ally itself, and Lassalle set to work to form a genuine working-class party out of the discontented elements. In his celebrated Open Letter, he expounded with marvellous clearness and wonderful knowledge the principles which should guide the working-classes in their political and social aspirations. Here we have the Socialist movement first establishing itself as an independent political party. This new party, named the Workmen’s Association, put forward its programme. It declared that social reform was the working man’s question, and that the time had come in the course of historic evolution when the working-classes were called upon to be the paramount political power as the preliminary step to working out their economic emancipation. The function of the State, Lassalle declared, was not that of a night-watchman whose only duty it was to prevent robbery and violence. The function of the State was to establish conditions which would enable the individual to reach to a culture, freedom, and happiness which he could never reach by his unaided efforts. It was for the working class—which is identical with the whole human race—to use the State for this purpose. Lassalle accepted the orthodox political economy, and from that showed that the existing economic order could never provide any substantial improvement in the condition of the wage-earners, and that improvement could only be obtained by abolishing the existing relations of labour and capitalism, out of which the misery of the people sprang. The famous ‘Iron Law of Wages’—the theory that under capitalism and competition wages tended to sink to the point of bare subsistence—with which the name of Lassalle is associated was not a theory created by himself, but was his logical deduction from the teaching of the orthodox political economists, particularly Ricardo. In this agitation Lassalle laid the foundations of the German Social Democratic Party, that great and growing workers’ party which is the admiration of Socialists the world over.

Contemporary with Lassalle’s political agitation, Karl Marx, the greatest name in the history of Socialism, was formulating those economic theories which have so powerfully influenced the subsequent development of Socialist opinion. He was a man of marvellous power—a Jew, like Lassalle—and possessed a learning which covered the whole range of economics, history, and philosophy. He felt that the Socialist theories of his predecessors were wanting in scientific basis, and he devoted himself and his great knowledge to remedying this defect. As the theories and contentions of Marx have played such an important part in the Socialist movement, and as these theories are still the accepted creed of the great body of Continental Socialists, it is necessary that they should receive as full a consideration as the limits of space in this brief treatise will permit.

[6]	Socialism—True and False, page 20.