"And so,

of Dr. Rae on this instance of "discord and division." with high thoughts of spreading a reign of fraternity over the earth, the International Working Men's Association perished, because being only human, it could not maintain fraternity in its own narrow borders. This is a history that repeats itself again and again in Socialist movements. As W. Marr said in the remark quoted above, revolutionists will only unite on a negation; the moment they begin to ask what they will put in its place they differ and dispute and come to nought. Apprehend them, close their meetings, banish their leaders, and you knit them by common suffering to common resistance. You supply them with a negation of engrossing interest, you preoccupy their minds with a negative programme which keeps them united, and so you prevent them from raising the fatal question-What next? which they never discuss without breaking up into rival sects and factions, fraternal often in nothing but their hatred. 'It is the shades that hate one another, not the colours.' Such disruptions and secessions may -as they did in Germany-by emulation, increase for a time the efficiency of the organization as a propagandist agency, but they certainly diminish its danger as a possible instrument of insurrection. A Socialist organization seems always to contain two elements of internal disintegration. One is the prevalence of a singular and almost pathetic mistrust of their leaders, and of one another. The law of suspects is always in force among themselves. At meetings of the German Socialists, Liebknecht denounces Schweitzer as an agent of the Prussian Government, Schweitzer accuses Liebknecht of being an Austrian spy, and the frequent, hints at bribery, and open charges of treason against the labourers' cause, disclose to us now duller and now more acute phases of that unhappy state of mutual suspicion, in which the one supreme, superhuman virtue, worthy to be worshipped, if happily it could anywhere be discovered, is the virtue men honoured even in Robespierre-the incorruptible. The other source of disintegration is the tendency to intestine divisions on points of doctrine. A reconstruction of society is necessarily a most extensive programme, and allows room for the utmost variety of opinion and plan. The longer it is discussed the more certainly do differences arise, and the movement becomes a strife of schools in no way formidable to the government. All this only furnishes another reason for the conclusion that in dealing with Socialist agitations, a government's safest as well as justest policy is, as much as may be, to leave them alone. Their danger lies in the cloudiness of their ideas, and that can only be dispersed in the free breezes of popular discussion. The sword is an idle method of reasoning with an idea; an idea will eventually yield to nothing but argument. Repression, too, is absolutely impossible with modern facilities of inter-communication, and can at best but drive the offensive elements for a time into subterranean channels, where they gather like a dangerous choke-damp that may occasion at any moment a serious explosion."

In the chapter in which Dr. Rae gives the result of his own cogitations on the Social Question, he appears to think he has admitted too much, and takes to the optimist view of "a system

of society, whose possibilities of answering the legitimate aspirations of the working classes are so far from being exhausted." He contests the chief arguments of the Socialists with great courage, and follows each attack with a damaging admission which makes him, like so many other writers on the subject, appear in the light of a bourgeois Balaam coming forth to curse and ending by blessing his opponents. For instance, according to him the Socialists greatly misconceive the effects of the large system of production of which he admits the result to be "the decadence of the lower middle classes"! the reduction of the workers" more and more to the permanent position of wage labourers"!! with "fewer opportunities of rising to a competency"!!! Again, Dr. Rae doughtily proclaims that "the position of the wage labourer is better than it has been for 300 years.' This assertion he supports by saying vaguely that butcher's meat was the only thing which was cheaper then than now (entirely forgetting the enormous rise in the item of rent), and, more vaguely still, that "then the general advantages of advancing civilization which are the heritage of all, were either absent or inferior." Of course he brings figures to aid him, and the best he can make of a comparison of the estimates of Gregory King and Dr. Davenant in 1688, with Mr. Dudley Baxter's calculation of the income of the working classes in 1867, and Professor Leone Levi's guess at their numbers in 1871, is that it is "sufficient to disperse gloomy apprehensions" to figure out that the average income of a working-class family is now £81, and that the producers of the total income of the country get 40 per cent. of it. He denies the truth of the "iron law of wages," on the ground that the standard economists hold that the amount of the mimimum wages depends on the standard of comfort which the workers will consent to adopt, and complacently concludes what he seems to think a triumphant demolition of the Socialist theory of wages by emphatically endorsing Adam Smith's dictum that " in a society in which industry was conducted without the intervention of an employing class the wages of labour would consist of its product."

The growing uncertainty of employment, owing to the introduction of labour-saving machinery and new methods of production, is first denied and then admitted by Dr. Rae, who sums up by declaring that "State provision of work has many drawbacks, but something more must be provided for the case than workhouse and prison." As to commercial crises he claims that we are free from famine, which was so terrible a scourge to our ancestors, though he had previously acknowledged the prevalence of starvation diseases amongst the agricultural labourers and wage-classes in towns; finally he looks for improvement, as usual, to the Socialist proposals of commercial statistics and international cooperation.

One of the worst instances of this writer's puzzleheadedness or wilful misinterpretation of fact appears in his criticism on our views of the remuneration of labour. 66 'Why is an organiser of manual labour better paid than the manual labourer himself? Why is the railway chairman better paid than the railway porter? Is it because he exerts more labour, more socially necessary time o

labour? No, the explanation is not to be found in different quantities of labour, but in different qualities of labour.

Let every man have according to his work if you will; but then, in measuring work, the true standard of its value is not its duration but the social importance of the service it is calculated to render." Here, of course, Dr. Rae assumes that there is a free competition for the office of chairman of a railway. He chooses to forget that one of the conditions of eligibility is considerable wealth, the possession of a large number of shares in the concern, and that among the few who satisfy these conditions, and who therefore naturally want a high reward to tempt them to undertake their nominal work, there is a combination stronger than any trade union. We can guess what would be the remuneration of industrial managers under free competition from the fact that the cleverest of our middle class youths can be got to go to India as civil servants-submit, that is, to exile in a bad climate where money is less valuable than at home-for £400 per annum, and here also the middle class trade union raises the salary. But we prefer to meet Dr. Rae on his own ground when he says with charming frankness that it is useless to talk about the justice of the matter," the real question is whether society can perform the services it now accepts from private capitalists better or more economically without them." We think it can, because with the increasing displacement of individual by joint-stock enterprise, the capitalist ceases to perform any service whatever, delegating all the work of organising and administering the business to elected and paid officials, who could just as easily be elected by society. The only difference would be that now the shareholders insist that their officials shall secure a profit from the business; then society, equally prompted by self-interest, would insist that the business should be conducted so as to benefit the community. Let us take as an illustration the change which is going on under our own eyes in the methods of retail trade. In the year of the battle of Waterloo the largest shop in London is said to have employed but sixteen assistants. Now there are in the metropolis firms which employ sixteen hundred men and women in carrying on a dozen branches of retail trade under one management. This change has been effected in three score years and ten by the same causes which revolutionised productive industry. The Universal Providers, Bon Marchés, and Co-operative Stores have come into existence, multiplied and thriven because they perform their services to society "better and more economically" than do petty shopkeepers. Everyone sees that in the competitive struggle the big firm, with its enormous capital, its economy in rent, lighting and superintendence and its advantage in buying on a large scale must eventually crush out its weaker rivals. The small firms indeed are finding out that it is so in the large towns, and the establishment of the Parcels Post, the last encroachment of the State on private enterprise, will undoubtedly ruin hundreds of shopkeepers in country towns as their patrons find it possible to transfer their custom to the co-operative stores in London. This form of expropriation (without compensation) of the smaller capitalist by the greater goes on, in spite of the protest of its victims, and with such

rapidity that in the next generation England will no longer be a nation of shopkeepers. But the gigantic emporium which proves its fitness to survive by drawing to itself the trade of fifty bankrupt shopkeepers is invariably the property, not of one individual, but of many capitalists. Their function is not to exercise the "organising brain of which we hear so much. That is done by the managers, secretaries and officials who are elected and paid fixed salaries by the proprietors or shareholders, who beyond this election take no active part in the business. Now let us ask Dr. Rae's question. Is it not certain that the organising officials could be appointed by a board of directors elected by the whole community in the town, district or nation just as well as they are now appointed by a board elected by the shareholders? The saving would consist of the whole of the profits of the business. In point of fact this saving has been effected by the "municipalization" of the gas and water supply in Birmingham. Can any sane man doubt that similar economies will shortly be effected in all concerns in which the natural evolution of society has reduced the proprietors to the position of mere dividend absorbing shareholders? And this is the position at this moment of the proprietors of our railways, shipping, tramways, omnibuses, collieries and mines, while every branch of industry is in a more or less advanced stage of the progress from control by the individual to control by the community through its representatives. course Dr. Rae paints the evils of bureaucratic management in dark colours, and says nothing as to the waste caused by competition. Those who share his terrors would do well to read the chapters on Democratic Administration in Mr. Laurence Gronlund's work, "The Co-operative Commonwealth" of which an English edition is now published.

Of

After a great deal of confused writing Dr. Rae finally comes to the conclusion that the best hope of improvement lies in the extension of trade unions, social reforms, and co-operative production, and fails utterly to see that each argument in favour of his proposals applies with tenfold force to carrying them out nationally and internationally by the collective self-help of the workers themselves organised in the democratic State. Many of the faults of the book are no doubt due to the fact that the chapters were written separately and thrown together afterwards. But it is, with all its faults, more likely to make its readers Socialists than a much better book by a much better writer. It is likely to be read by many a man who would never take up an avowed defence of Collectivism and no one can read it carefully without coming to the conclusion that the theories of Socialists are supported by Dr. Rae himself whenever he descends to argument.

H. H. CHAMPION.

TO-DAY.

No. 17.-JUNE, 1885.

Socialist Spring Song.

The Spring is here, and the long nights grow
Less bitterly cold than awhile ago,
Our rags serve their purpose now and keep
Warmth enough in us to let us sleep,
The rain that trickles down our walls

No longer seems to freeze as it falls,

There was dust, not mud, on our feet today,
There's some green in a flower-pot over the way,
The sky-strip over the court 's changed hue-
From dull yellow-gray to clear gray blue;
Through our broken windows no more the storm
Laughs and shrieks as we try to keep warm,
But through dusty panes long sunbeams peer,
For the Spring is here.

Small joy the greenness and grace of spring.
To gray hard lives like our own can bring.

A drowning man cares little to think

Of the lights on the waves where he soon must sink.

The greenest garments the spring can wear

Are black already with our despair.

Earth will be one with us soon, shall we care

If snow or sunshine be over us there,

Or if wintry the world be we found so drear
Or if Spring be here ?

In the Western half of our Christian town
The winter only pretends to frown,

Vol. III.

No. 6. New Series.

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