The Forerunners

I

THE most important event of the last quarter-century has probably been the placing of socialism in a central position before the judicial mind of the age. European men of letters, ever since the Industrial Revolution, have been occupied with the quest for social justice. It should be profitable to look back, seeking to relate their message to the socialist ideal. Their voices are living yet. The melancholy music of Leopardi, Heine, Lamennais, is faint but audible; the pure accents of Mazzini, the sonorous harmonies of Victor Hugo, may be caught without straining the ear. But we are more insistently held by the mordant speech of Ibsen, Hauptmann, Suderman; while it is hard to tell whether that dubious measure of Nietzsche’s, which frightens and arrests, rises from dæmonic depths or floats downward from the heights attained by the victorious superman.

Those who use our English speech Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Carpenter, and the others — naturally speak to us most clearly; but overmastering all other tones, something of the ‘large utterance of the early gods’ reaches us from Russia. The great novels — Dostoiefsky’s pained and poignant studies of the world’s anguish, Tourguéneff’s sensitive delineation of the stupor of the oppressed, and the selfconsuming fever of the would-be redeemers — prepare us for the greatest of all; for the accusing, appealing words of him who so lately has passed ‘to where, beyond these voices, there is peace,’ Leo Tolstoï. Comprehensive study of the social message of even a few among these writers would involve more than one volume; perhaps within the compass of an article, we may offer a few hints concerning trend and affiliation.

To all these men, the social problem and the religious are blended. A metaphysical theology, peering into the sky, such as inspired thinkers from Augustine to Calvin, may still be pursued by specialists, but it has ceased to interest the world at large. Jonathan Edwards, John Bunyan, saw the soul in an awful solitude, alone with its God. But Carlyle’s ‘Sartor’ passed abruptly from the breathless mysticism of ‘Natural Supernaturalism’ to a scathing study of modern helotage; the religion sought by Mazzini and Tolstoï was one that should interpenetrate social relations; to Nietzsche, denial of God brought in its train denial of democracy and pity.

Aspiration, by the prerevolutionary schools, might have been pictured as a Blake-like figure, hands clasped above its head, struggling to free its feet from earth and to sweep upward like a diver into the high heaven. Aspiration, by the nineteenth century, was seen rather as Barnard has pictured it, — two comrades, pressing through an inert mass of rock, touching finger-tips only, yet straining with a power that must prevail toward the embrace they crave. Their heads are bent earthward; when the embrace is accomplished, they may look up toget her at the stars. Surely, this union of religious and social passion implies one real achievement of democracy. Class-barriers, in the outer world, may be high and hard: in the world within, the oneness of life begins to be perceived, and we know that we may find God only in finding our brethren. The sense of this oneness is the very condition of our being, the medium in which we move.

II

So far so good. But when we pass further, we are disappointed. We ask from our leaders some unity in social leadership; they give us only unity in negation. It is hard to find in earlier days anything like the agreement in discontent that marks the higher reaches of nineteenth-century thought. Elizabethan England, the Greece of Pericles, the Florence of the Renascence, felt an eager joy in life and an exultant patriotism, thinly disguised by the captiousness of social censors and leading to delightful naive self-glorification. Complacency has not been lacking to the Age of Steam, but it has not come from the men of imagination and vision. In the utterances from every European country, restlessness deepens into dissatisfaction, and at times almost into despair.

In this discontent are two recurrent strains, — often blended, yet independent in origin. The exasperated protest of stifled individualities, that first sounded so haughtily in the verse of Byron and Leopardi, echoed down the century, demanding, and in vain, freedom to expand to the full stature, sincerity, completeness, peace. Bitter and brilliant, the hatred of convention rang through the work of Ibsen and the Northerners. It had been mild and clear in Emerson; in thought like that of Edward Carpenter, it allied itself with Oriental mysticism, paradoxically drawing the soul aloof from the universe in the name of spiritual unity; in Nietzsche it found its apogee. The individualistic revolt! Germinated in that arrogant confidence in the sanctity of life, that denial of Sin, to which pre revolutionary thought gave birth, it entered, a strong ferment, the world of the Revolution. We were bidden to adore our own humanity: why not then indulge it? Why not resent all that fetters the free play of desire? Challenging marriage, reacting from all social forms of religion, never satisfied and never stilled, the Spirit of Revolt has roamed, an unquiet guest, through the stern ways of modern civilization. Toward restraining tradition, its attitude has been annoyed and supercilious. It has passed with alarming swiftness from literature, philosophy, music, to life, and back again. All classes catch the infection. We hear no longer the Jolly Beggars of Burns, trolling their ditty from the shelter of a barn: —

Persons of the best breeding and most delicate manners repeat in private a refined and intellectualized version of the same song. At times they use democratic language. But, on the whole, their spirit has worked against the leveling instincts of democracy, for its passion, however disguised, is separatist and hence aristocratic.

And blending with this, another strain, clear from the days of Shelley: the strain of sympathy. A force centrifugal as the other is centripetal: bringing absolution from egotism and self-absorption, through the power of a great compassion, that contemplates with heart-break not to be quieted the manifold miseries of proletariat and privileged, and cries that its brothers, rich and poor alike, are so fast in prison that they cannot get out. Pity for humanity, vehement if spasmodic in the pages of Rousseau, subdued in the measured lines of Cowper, has from the first been latent, has become increasingly potent, in the press and clamor of self-seeking modern life. As self-assertion has exalted itself into a defiant philosophy, self-effacement has focused itself into a devoted religion. In the English school, after the days of Byron, social compunction may be said on the whole to dominate the individualistic note. In Victor Hugo and the French group of '48, longing for a general blessedness is lambent but helpless; in Mazzini, it soars in flame of political and social aspiration. So the call to sacrifice and the call to dominate met confusedly in the literature of the last century, and united to challenge civilization. Egotism and altruism were allies for the time being in revolt against the social order.

III

The critics see this order supported on the one hand by grossly predatory institutions and instincts, on the other by the preaching of resignation and inaction in the name of religion and the Church. Let us glance at one or two phases of the indictment, — most sharply defined, though not most intensely felt, in the individualistic schools.

Here is Ibsen. He passes from mystical romance to experiments in the furthest reaches of realism, yet in both mediums the spirit of negation persists unrelenting. Sympathies are always worsted by the perception of fact. Brand, refuser of compromise, dear to the author’s heart as he demands ‘all or nothing,’ is mercilessly routed. From Julian, fine champion of Pagan glories, is wrested confession of the victory of the religion of defeat. Peer Gynt, the man capable of maintaining his superb delusions in the face of supreme degradation, is a poor creature after all. The curious verse, hot with symbolic imaginings, yields to sardonic prose. We pass in scornful review the worthlessness of the Pillars of Society, the Doll’s House where women live, the rout of idealist folly by that modern Vittoria Corombona, Hedda Gabler, and the will-o’-the-wisp aspiration that leads a Master-builder to fling himself from the apex of his own building.

Through the tame bourgeois society pictured by Ibsen in all its flatness, pulse the same demands of suffocated persons for warmth, life, honesty, that break in the Jacobean drama like a raging surf against the silence of eternal law. Only the stage has changed — surely for the worse — between The White Devil and Hedda Gabler, and the breakwater against which desire hurls itself in vain is now erected rather by Society than by Nature. Domestic amenities, political moralities, artistic aspirations, crumble to dust, touched by the finger of the satirist. What survives is a thwarted will, — one is never quite sure whether vicious or honest, — asserting itself in helpless defiance above the débris of a civilization viewed with unmitigated contempt. ‘From special reforms I hope nothing,’ writes Ibsen to Brandès. ‘The whole race is on the wrong track.’ And again: ‘The State must be abolished: in that revolution I will take part.’ In another passage, the emotion underlying this riot of accusation is for once allowed free vent: ‘There are actually moments when the whole history of the world appears to me like one great shipwreck, and the important thing seems to be to save one’s self.’

A thinker of tins temper may clear the air, but will hardly help men find their way. Influenced by Ibsen, the Northern schools of novel and drama rarely get beyond him. The conflict of an Ego that claims gratification as its right, but finds that very gratification deadly to itself as well as to others, is the recurrent theme, in realism or romance: whether seen in Magda, cruelly gentle, failing to keep her own soul alive and dubiously benefiting the soul of any one else; or in Heinrich, lured by Rautendelein, only (o doom that bewitching spirit of natural joy to cold nuptials with the Nickerman, and himself to heart-break from remorse over the murder of domestic affection involved in his escape from the warm, dull ways of human fellowship. The courage of negation may be the chief virtue our times require, but it places an icy finger at the heart of life.

These later schools have of course passed under t he spell of a more daring genius than Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche. In Nietzsche, negation certainly overleaps itself, and ‘falls on the other,’ into a topsy-turvy world where drastic denials suddenly appear as supreme affirmations. With how alluring a play of imagery and feeling he attacked the smug assumptions of a nominal democracy and a faded Christianity! With what audacious splendor he asserted the aristocratic ideal! and called us to burn what we had adored!

’The leveling and diminishing of man in Europe conceal our greatest danger. Having ceased to fear man, we have ceased to love him. His very aspect bores us to-day. We are weary of humanity.’ ‘I understood that this ethic of compassion, which was spreading constantly, was the most disquieting feature of our European culture.' When will the schools of compassion triumph in their bad work? ‘When they shall succeed in forcing into the consciousness of happy people the misery of others. Away with this shameful weakening of feeling! The well can not be allowed liberty to act as physicians, saviors, consolers.’

This reversal of our moral standards carried with it the political and social implications to be expected. Was it question of the state, ‘where the slow suicide of all calls itself life’? ‘Open your ears, for 1 am going to talk to you of the death of the peoples.’ And brotherhood? 4Do I advise you to love your neighbor? Rather would I advise you to flee your neighbor, and love that which is afar.’ How about that ‘Eldest of tilings, divine Equality/ so passionately hymned of Shelley? To Nietzsche, she is a poisonous tarantula with the revolutionary triangle on her back.

Let us be candid; this brutally potent and poetic react ion from the social idealism born of democracy brought refreshment, brought relief. We welcomed in it the last, bravest word of that spirit of impatient egotism that prowls in the depth of very nature as in the breadth of the civilized world.

But the relief was short-lived, for the virus of compassion that Nietzsche hated was too inward to expel. He felt this himself. ‘Woe! Bitten by the tarantula, my old enemy!’ he cries; ‘with her certitude and her divine beauty, she has bitten my finger!’ She has certainly bitten ours; no antidote avails to set our system free or to turn us into aristocrats again. The trouble with most of us is that we are mean-spirited. We do not really want to be supermen unless everybody else has a chance of getting to be a superman too. We remark with Browning: ‘Make no more giants, God, but elevate the race at once,’ — a phrase which Nietzsche had considered quite worthy of the half-medkeval Paracelsus.

IV

If we turn from the schools of egotism to the schools of pity, we shall find a view of modem civilization no more reassuring on the whole. Bui let us call a halt, for it is dreary business longer to contemplate a world out of joint. A protest reaches us from many quarters, telling us that croaking is very bad for the vocal chords! In this world that seems so corrupt, if you take the evidence of the problem-play or the anarchist, myriads of people live healthy and happy lives.

This is true, and good to remember; but it does not silence the Amice of the Accuser. What use to tell a man whose lungs are diseased that there is nothing wrong with his digestion? In the social as in the physical body, the slightest disorder of a part involves a general distress; and while sweat-shops and child-labor flourish, we must be excused from comforting ourselves by reflections on the admirable living conditions enjoyed by large sections of our commuting population or by peasants across the sea.

There is this to be learned, however, from the protest: if we aspire to health, it is not only mournful but demoralizing to dwell on disease. There is no point to diagnosis unless it leads to remedies. And every modern social critic has a remedy to suggest. We cannot. speak of them in detail, for while the indictments largely agree, the prescriptions differ. But we can group them.

Social idealism during its more positive and constructive moments has rallied around two banners. On the one is inscribed, Moralize civilization! on the other, Abandon it!

The plea to moralize was superficial enough at times. There have been many to believe, with Dickens, with Victor Hugo, that the world can lie saved by the simple application of sentiment. Yet better thought, searching and rich in suggestion, supplemented by an immense amount, of ardent action, has been expended in this way.

The application of moral idealism to a situation unchanged, if not unchallenged, has been looked to as the one sure path to social welfare. Carlyle had united with his vital denunciations a rousing call to act, but had given no instructions as to the way to follow. His disciples pushed his teaching further; laid down a new chivalry of sacrifice and service for those ‘Captains of Industry’ whom Carlyle had hailed as masters of the future; and returning to the old platonic doctrine of the elimination of wants, summoned men to refrain from luxury in the name of brotherhood. Ruskin in particular evoked for us an attractive picture: a society in layers, like Mr. Galsworthy’s pagoda, where heaven-born inequalities gave scope for sweet ministries of obedience and authority, in a frame of immutable justice that knew in its manifestations neither growth nor decay.

Less logically worked out, similar-suggestions inspired nearly all nineteenth-century philanthropy and reform. Mazzini welcomed indeed the democracy still viewed by England with distrust, but was preoccupied with the now superseded belief in the superiority of one form of government over another. Saturated with fine social idealism, his thought still has power to thrill; his programme is forgotten. Preaching and practice on the same lines filled the century. Let the system stand as it is: let-the-employer be induced to deal justly and kindly, and the employed give faithful service; let the landlord keep his property in repair, and the tenant be persuaded to become clean instead of dirty. Convert your individuals, and society as it is will be very satisfactory; leave them unconverted, and no change in system can avail.

It was simple, it was magnificent, but was it war? Many think so. Large numbers are still attacking the citadel of ancient wrong on these lines, with unabated valor and heroic effort, believing that the conversion of the individual life within an unchanged economic order is the one thing needful. But from the first there were some to hesitate. Seeking with the greatest docility to apply these solutions, they have found them discredited by the onward movement of life, and have felt as men hurtling against vast forces, dimly descried, not to be routed by their gallant efforts. The number of these people is increasing every day. In bitterness of soul, they have experienced the inadequacy of philanthropy; in distressed amaze they confront, so they believe, the failure of reform. And as they reflect, it seems to them that intelligent foresight on a large scale was lacking to the teaching of the great masters, and that the positive teaching revealed in life itself laughs at their gospels.

What alternative for such as these, who turn away disheartened from the modern exponents either of philanthropy or of reform? There are teachers who bring another message. We agree with you, they say: to moralize civilization is a hopeless task. Very well; let us abandon it. ‘Civilization, its Cause and Cure,’ is the text of their teaching, and its burden is the ‘Call of the Wild.’

Very fascinating is the message of the anarchists, from Thoreau to Edward Carpenter, as they bid us shake the dust of cities from our feet, and take on our lips the Song of the Open Road. A finer form of personal revolt inspires their plea than that which agitates the sullen ladies and gentlemen of the Ibsen drama. It is touched with poetry, with hope, with freshness,—this call to return to Nature, which ever since the days of Rousseau has echoed through myriad hearts.

And yet, the more one thinks, the more one perceives that it is a call to fettered men.

For unless one withdrew to a tropical climate, as Carpenter once naïvely counseled, one would have to wear clothes. And every fibre in them would sing the modern Song of the Shirt, — recalling the interminable array of men and women — clerks, dressmakers, sewing-girls, factory hands, reaching back to the tenders of silkworms or gatherers of cotton — who had given life and labor, often under conditions bitterly wrong, that we might be clad. The same truth holds of all the simplest, most inalienable trappings of life. Abandon? We cannot. Our every movement precludes the possibility. Separate ourselves as we will from our brothers, we may not, short of suicide, refuse the gifts they offer. Who, offering nothing in return, can be content? Who can retire to a wholesome and normal personal existence, and rest there satisfied, refusing that reciprocity of sacrifice which is the first law of decent life?

V

And what said Tolstoï, — the sad Titan, who rises head and shoulders above all other self-constituted guides of the nineteenth century, — the one figure—if we except Karl Marx who has not yet appeared upon our scene — of international importance?

Here is a man whose searching simplicity has power to touch our most inward wounds. From the story of Levin to that of Nekludoff, has he not writ large, with honesty only equaled by his subtlety, the spiritual autobiography of his age? In Tolstoï, all the noblest forces of the social idealism of the last century are at last blended. Here the longing for personal escape and the longing for social redemption are harmonized, for we deal with a nature whose most secret individual craving is simply that love may be freed from remorse. A personal motive impels Tolstoï: the restive hunger for a satisfaction which the world, especially the modern world, fails to afford. But individual aspiration is woven in one strand with social compunction, and in expressing the deep and complex pain that springs from the union, he has few equals in this or any age.

Egotism here soars till it is one with altruism, in a purer air where the two constructive impulses which have severally dominated the modern seekers are indistinguishable. To moralize society was Tolstoy’s central aim, but his means was to abandon it. The escape from civilization was the constant theme of his philosophy, the experiment of his noblest characters, the spur to the final tragedy. But in such escape, indefinitely repeated, he saw not only the way to personal peace, but the one hope for general social salvation. In the organic fullness of his thought, his art, his life, we find the richest teaching, apart from the great school not yet mentioned, which the last century had to offer to the social seeker.

It is in the inimitable pages of What is to be Done? that he most fully traces his experience — an experience common and baffling.

Who can read unmoved the graphic, naïve story: how, horrified by the pauperism of Moscow, he set himself to the work of relief, and how, having yielded to the first impulse of casual almsgiving, he felt, suddenly overwhelmed with shame? ‘ I felt and can never cease to feel myself a partaker in a crime which is continually being committed, so long as I have two coats while there exists one man without any.’ With what grave irony the tale goes on, narrating the effort to rouse the conscience of friends, the personal ministrations, the organized philanthropy, and the startling discovery that the misery of the poor lay so deep that ‘their misfortunes could not be met by exterior means’! Driven from one vantage-ground to another, helpless before Rzhanoff’s tenement-house, the centre of his efforts, Tolstoï frankly faces the situation in words that have become classic: ‘The theory by which men who have freed themselves from personal labor justify themselves, in its simplest form, is this: “ We men, having freed ourselves from work, and having by violence appropriated the labor of others, find ourselves better able to help them.” It is as if I were sitting on the neck of a man, and having quite crushed him down, I compel him to carry me, and assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his condition by every means in my power, except by getting off his back.’

And the means to get off his back? It is here, when Tolstoï turns from confession to reparation, that we listen breathless; and the message we hear is definite: ‘I came to the following simple conclusion, that in order to avoid causing the sufferings and the depravity of men, I ought to make other men work for me as little as possible, and to work myself as much as possible.’ The old doctrine: withdrawal to country life, the elimination of wants, on the Ruskinian pattern, devotion to manual labor, the making of perishable shoes substituted for the making of immortal books.

An alluring path, but one which leads surely into the desert. And what relation has the peace that is waiting there to Rzhanoff’s, left behind?

There was a relation in Tolstoï’s mind. His healthy existence in the fields holds, so he believed, healing for the woes of the tenement. Let all men do likewise, — refrain from preying upon the labor of others, and purify their lives. As first result, the crushing toil involved in the production of luxuries will be removed from the world’s shoulders; then, among those subject to discipline, will be born a distaste for the possession of property; and a voluntary communism, Christian, free, and gentle, will spread till the world is redeemed.

No thoughtful man can dismiss this conception lightly. Yet the sadness that invades us as we brood over it is not wholly due to personal cowardice. It springs rather from the vision of ultimate reactions. Tolstoï does not shrink from the repudiation of art and science; he dismisses with scorn the modern conception of progress. But many of us cannot follow him. Over the suicide of civilization we pause, hesitant; the Gospels seem to us richer, wider, than in the Tolstoyan version; despite our dissatisfactions, a reverence for life in its entirety is ingrained within us. We can never believe that to abandon the world will either moralize or save it.

Moreover, the method has already been well tried. It is at least, as old as the days of Saint Benedict. In its time it was a great, an effective stroke for human perfection; but that time is over. Tolstoï, driven by prescient instinct, fled at the point of death to his true home; nor has history a more impressive scene in its private annals than that which shows us the patriarch wise with all modern culture, to whom wistful pilgrims, in search of a social gospel, had come by throngs, especially from the United States, retiring at the last to those monasteries in the borderland between East and West where the immemorial tradition of purity in abnegation still holds sway, and there discoursing with his recluse sister or with ancient sages wrapped in contemplative calm.

Between the superb arrogance of Nietszche, and this new a narchist asceticism, so tender, so difficult, so aimless, we may choose if we will. But the fate of their exponents is not reassuring. On the one hand, is a tragic figure dying in an insane asylum. On the other, is one still more tragic: a man who for many years had been driven by perplexed affection to compromise with his conscience, who had sought in vain to attain a fallacious peace by imitating in superficial externals the life of the peasants he honored, while the real sting of poverty remained unknown, and tender ministries slipped sachets of his favorite perfume among his linen; and who in extremis triumphantly vindicated his spiritual honor only by cruelly violating his human ties. He died, pitifully worsted in his vain effort to escape communal guilt; most appealing, most futile figure of this strange modern world.

Nietszche and Tolstoï each has his followers; the former, probably more numerous, were hidden things revealed. Indeed, one would not deprecate the value of any phase of the teachings at which we have glanced. At every point troubled spirits have found rest, if not healing. Throngs are still laboring valiantly, and not all unfruitfully, to moralize the present order. An occasional rare soul flees from the press, to dwell with soothfastness. But apart from these fortunate ones, how great the host of the unsatisfied! They find the aristocratic solution impossible because they are built on another pattern; the attempt to moralize, the attempt to abandon, seem to them experiments disproved. In one way or another, they believe, all the solutions offered by the nineteenth-century man of letters make the Great Refusal, — the refusal of life itself, either in its richest aspect of sacrifice or in its lower aspect of fulfillment and possession.

VI

We raise our eyes from the brilliant, disappointing pages of the theorists. We turn them to the field of life. New hope awaits us there. For instantly we perceive a force ignored by other ideals of social redemption, at work through all the century, appearing ever and again in a new guise, and constantly enriching and clarifying its formulæ. This is the force of socialism. It desires neither to moralize nor to abandon, but to transform. Its faith, based on sound scrutiny of the past, looks into long reaches of the future, and calls for constructive action on a vast scale, to be carried out, not through multiplied isolated efforts, but through the coördinated activities of a collective will. Reviewing its story, from the early days of the Utopists, past the rise of the scientific school under Marx, through the long processes of growth and conflict, we cannot fail to acknowledge its persistence, its adaptability, the singular depth of its relation to the changing order.

Here at the outset we find a striking difference between these schools and those we have reviewed. For the solutions proposed by the idealists bear no relation at the root to the particular economic conditions of their day. Describing evils, they are poignantly modern; proposing remedies, they address man as if he existed, not in time, but in eternity. Their gospels would have been equally pertinent in any age. Nietszche’s Paganism simply touched to keener self-consciousness the implicit. Hellenic ideal; Ruskin, Tolstoï, spoke in the main with a wisdom known more fully to the thirteenth century. Not without meaning did Ruskin find himself in dream girt with the Franciscan cord; and pilgrims who kneel in July at the Portiuncula in Assisi, invoking the spirit of the Poverello, might well on departing wend their way to Russia, and renew continuous devotions in that twentieth-century shrine on the estate of Yasnaya Polyana, — the hut where Tolstoï died.

All is different in the socialist movement. It, too, in its youth had dreamed ancient dreams, and joined to the full in the good old game of Utopiaweaving; in its manhood, it put away childish things. In 1848 appeared a modest, epoch-making document, The Communist Manifesto. No one paid much attention to it; it did not rise into the region of polite letters. Nevertheless, it marks the advent of a new force, for here at once is the frank demand for an economic reading of history, the insistence on economic analysis of actual conditions in the light of their origin as the only clue to a sound programme of advance. The ground is never abandoned. Marx was close contemporary of Darwin; and in Capital, whatever its blunders, the firm adherence to positive and evolutionary methods is as distinct as in The Origin of Species itself. In the adherence to these methods, socialism first entered the field of practical politics and became an effective force.

They were methods which the idealists of the nineteenth century always distrusted. These gazed upward into the open sky of Platonic idealism; they surveyed at times the limited horizon of the present, within which the Manchester School was pursuing its cheerful observations. Beyond this, the eye attempted no adventure. Wavering in their attitude toward democracy, they were as a rule half-contemptuous toward evolutionary theory as a whole. For they scented in it a danger of materialism, as in democracy a danger of mob-rule. Still to-day the world at large echoes them. The socialist stress on a change in the economic order as the one means to social welfare is shocking to the ordinary mind, which insists as in the last century on attacking the problem from the moral end alone. We are aware that in the organization of a hospital or the building of a railway, moral ideals may inspire but practical forces must do the work. Yet we continue to think that in the building of the state or the care of our social invalids, the one thing needful is to rouse the conscience; and the appeal on a large scale to economic forces for the modification of economic phenomena — an appeal which is the essence of those maligned doctrines, economic determinism and class-consciousness — is still suspect. Yet the individual soul is ushered into our world by material means, and it is hard to see why the idea that the soul of a new age must follow suit should prove distressing. Reading Engels after Tolstoï gives a shock, as if one had come from a church into a department store. But if we are concerned over the conditions of shop-girls, a store is a better field of experiment than a church, though it is open to us to feel that the church in the background has also a rôle in the matter.

Here, at all events, was the point of fissure between socialism and the great nineteenth-century masters. Socialism flushed to one side, with impatience, all private solutions of social problems on the lines of the moral categories alone. It insisted that moralizing things as they are is useless, because things are not going to stay as they are; and that the only method of progress is, first to discover, then to direct, the secret forces making for social change, as we do all other forces of nature. To relate social progress to reality, to knit ethical ideals into the intimate laws of economic development, is the surprising feat of that school, considered at least in its earlier phases to mark the extremity of fantastic extravagance.

Our idealists scouted the method. But of course socialism has not only a method, but a principle and an aim.

If it satisfies, where the idealists fail, the craving for a vision of a reasonable and just human future, the reason is that it strikes boldly at the foundations of society, and demands that private property be limited if not abolished. Now, this is a conception, in the immortal words of Dogberry, most tolerable and not to be endured. All liberties may be taken with an Angora cat so long as her sacred tail be not disturbed; touch that, and scratches and spitting are your portion. Handle not the principle of Property, however gently. The most fiery radicalism, from the days of the Girondists, has refrained from attacking it; modern Liberalism has regarded it with more respect by far than did the Middle Ages. To the popular mind, it is somehow involved with the mysteries of marriage and the sanctities of religion. An ideal remote from practice, but attractive in theory, floats before our minds: Justice in gain, moderation in use, generosity in expenditure, distribution. We are moved to tears when we contemplate this ideal partially fulfilled at the last point alone by our millionaires; we are sure that, were we millionaires, we should observe it. Preach stewardship as much as you like, give away all your goods if you wish. But propose no restrictions through the common will on the instincts of acquisition.

Nevertheless, the thought of the proscribed and obscure in all ages has ended by coming out into the light of day. Working underground silently in every epoch, preached from Plato on by an occasional visionary, it claims at last to be fortified by a scientific study of the actual trend of things. Dramatically, centrally, it stands before the eyes of men. They may scout and refute it as they will, they cannot ignore it. The right to private property is no longer an assumption to build on, it is a thesis to be proved.

How is it related to that quest for social justice which we have followed through ‘ the wilderness of a wide world in an atheistic century’?

Here a surprise awaits us. The social critics shrank from the method of socialism: one and all, they emphatically rejected the name. Yet with its essential spirit, and with its central principle, if we except Nietszche, they prove to be so amazingly in accord, that it is difficult not to recognize in socialism the home which they never reach, but toward which they were journeying.

The socialist indictment simply gathered into one and related to a centre the impressions scattered through the vivid books of the idealists. Here is the same revulsion from a society sordid and soiled as that felt so intensely by Hauptmann in The Weavers, and by Zola in Germinal. Socialist analysis could cut no deeper than in the pregnant phrase of Ruskin, ‘All social evils spring from the pillage of the laborer by the idler’; or in Tolstoï’s bold words, which might have been penned by Marx himself, ‘Property is the root of all evil, and at the same time property is that toward which all the activity of our modern society is directed, and that which directs the activity of the world’

If the indictments are alike, inspiration too is similar, for socialism, like the broader movement, includes men inspired by personal revolt and those moved wholly by chivalric pity. But it is when we come to the positive side and the central ideal that the points of contact are most striking, — so striking, so salient, that the groping instincts of the leaders we have considered seem like little lanterns wandering in a fog, which yield, when united in socialism, a light strong enough to reveal the path that leads onward toward the perfect day.

Efforts to moralize the existing order had led even Ruskin to a faint vision of a coöperative society, although the advance toward that society was conceived in fantastic fashion, and a lingering light from the set sun of feudalism played over the country of his dreams. Mazzini, in some ways greatest among the prophets, had stressed Association with mystic intensity. The communistic state foreseen by Tolstoï as the goal of voluntary sacrifice, was the same that shines, albeit dimly, before many a socialist: thinker, as the last stage of inevitable economic evolution, beyond an intermediate organization.

Points of significant prophecy press upon us as we think. Carlyle’s distressful cry for Authority as he faced the riot of individualistic democracy in early Victorian days is still the question of questions: ‘How in connection with inevitable democracy, is indispensable Sovereignty to exist? ’ Where can it be answered except in socialism, with its conception of a democracy profoundly social and organized, where the authority of the collective wall shall secure from each man his due quota of productive toil and ensure to each his due reward? Matthew Arnold, silent concerning social misery and preoccupied with our intellectual defects, had harped on the need for an extension of the power of the state, and put his finger on social inequality as the source of our worst evils. ‘Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower.’ ‘Political freedom may well be established by aristocratic founders. Social freedom, equality, that is rather the field of the conquests of democracy.’ Such remarks are pure socialism. Finally, did not Arnold agree with Mazzini, with Ruskin, — each more unlikely than the other, — in turning away discomfited from the vain effort to rouse the privileged classes to moralize society, and in the title of a late essay, ‘Ecce Convertimur ad Gentes,’ introduce a principle of wide reach and dubious implication: the appeal to the proletariat as the leaders of the future?

It is in the most vital and constructive regions of their thought that our old leaders present points of agreement with the new school. Difference as to method, not as to principle or goal, separates socialism of the modern scientific type from the best nineteenth-century idealism. To escape from the baffling tangle of these writers into the socialist world, is to experience such relief as a trapped creature may feel when a sudden movement sets his foot, free and the world awaits his choosing. What if the socialists are right about method? What if they do not de-moralize the universe, but simply put moral forces in the secret, sacred place where Nature puts them? Perhaps that union of religious and social passion which we signaled at the outset as the one sure modern achievement, will be energized and liberated when socialism impregnates it with a deeper reverence for fact. Should we ever come to believe this, and to accept the socialist reading of history, we shall swiftly acknowledge that the best elements in the fine but confused social idealism of the last century are crystallized for the first time into coherent and effective form by the socialist creed.