PRIMITIVE PROPERTY AND MODERN SOCIALISM. 



445 



eral delegates, including Liebkneeht, the member 

 of the German Reichstag, whom Hcrr Bamberger 

 styles the spiritus rector of German Socialism. 

 The resolution ran : " Considering that so long 

 as the land, and the other instruments of produc- 

 tion, which are the means of life, are held and 

 appropriated by individuals or sections, the eco- 

 nomical subjection of the mass of the people, with 

 all its attendant miseries and starvation, must 

 continue, the Congress declares it is necessary 

 that the state or the commune, representing the 

 whole of the people, should possess the land and 

 the other instruments of labor." 



The Jewish Lassalle, who was born in 1825 

 at Breslau, first gave a scientific form to German 

 Socialism. His brilliant gifts and great acquire- 

 ments were recognized by Heine, who made his 

 acquaintance in Paris, and, though he ruled Ger- 

 man Socialists with a despotism which he did 

 not attempt to dissemble, their admiration of him 

 never wavered. His short and troubled career 

 was closed by a duel which appears to have arisen 

 from a love-affair at Geneva in August, 1864 ; 

 but his disciples regarded him as a martyr to 

 Socialism, and have continued to pay almost divine 

 honors to his memory. Pastor Schuster traces 

 the birth of German Socialism to a letter from 

 Lassalle of March 2, 1863, on the proposal to 

 convoke a General Labor Congress at Leipsic. 

 Lassalle's successors in the leadership of the 

 movement have, however, far outstripped him 

 in audacity of conception. His scheme, probably 

 suggested by study of the system of state work- 

 shops favored by M. Louis Blanc and his friends, 

 assumed it to be the duty of the state to support 

 labor by subventions. He had not risen to the 

 idea that the state is simply the working-class 

 impersonated, and that, in receiving help from 

 the state, the workman is merely taking of nis 

 own. Lassalle, too, was still in the trammels of 

 faith in nationalities, and supposed German work- 

 men to be Germans as well as workmen. Grad- 

 ually the Socialist claims have developed, and 

 their ambition has passed the boundaries of Ger- 

 many. German Socialists, under the guidance 

 of Herr Marx in his London cottage, regard them- 

 selves as locally Germans, but as Germans in no 

 other sense. Living in Germany, they must work 

 with the political instruments its constitution 

 provides, and they try to control the Legislature. 

 But German sympathies or antipathies they have 

 none. For German unity they have as thorough 

 a contempt as any Polish Ultramontane. When 

 society is refashioned after their model, national 

 barriers will be broken down, or retained only 



for economical convenience. The state, what- 

 ever the width of the term, will not dole out, as 

 Lassalle anticipated, subventions to workshops, 

 as a superior to an inferior, but will own, and the 

 communes administer, in the name of the work- 

 man, the capital of society for the benefit of the 

 workmen who alone will constitute it. As the 

 world is not likely to be won over in a day to 

 subvert all existing arrangements, Socialism con- 

 sents to pave the way to a state monopoly of 

 capital in trust for the workman by usiug its in- 

 fluence to make the state grant subventions for 

 the establishment, as Lassalle had suggested, of 

 cooperative workshops and farms. But these 

 can be only temporary arrangements in anticipa- 

 tion of the day when the laborer shall have re- 

 duced all to his own level, and have entered into 

 his inheritance of the world's accumulated cap- 

 ital. 



The programme requires an autocracy to bring 

 it to pass, and an autocracy to work it when 

 adopted, and many workmen who suffer with dif- 

 ficulty the mild rule of an employer long resisted 

 even in Germany the claims of Herr Marx. But 

 in 1875 the residue of German workmen who had 

 clung to the freer sectional organization — a spe- 

 cies of working-men's Congregationalism — con- 

 templated by Lassalle, had to succumb to the 

 "Communists." Up to May, 1875, there had 

 been two Socialist parties in Germany, " the All- 

 gemeine deutsche Arbeiterverein " and the " So- 

 cial-demokratische Arbeiterpartei." The former 

 represented the opinions of Lassalle, and had for 

 its president the deputy Hasenclever ; the latter 

 was guided apparently by Bebel and Liebkneeht, 

 but really by Karl Marx. Long at feud, they 

 were fused by the Gotha Congress of May, 1875, 

 into the " Socialistische Arbeiterpartei " of Ger- 

 many. But it was a fusion in which the doctrines 

 of the elder party disappeared, and those of Karl 

 Marx alone survived. If the vision of the present 

 leaders should ever be realized, all human beings 

 would be bound to earn their own subsistence ; 

 none would be entitled to exemption from toil 

 because their ancestors had labored for them. 

 The phrase, always much to be deprecated, " an 

 independent gentleman," as applied to one who 

 has inherited a fortune, and therefore need not 

 work to make one, would cease to have a mean- 

 ing. So, too, would the word " employer " or 

 " master ; " indeed, the German Socialist is some- 

 what impatient of the continued existence of for- 

 eign societies which occupy themselves exchisive- 

 ly with questions of wages. The German Social- 

 ist, who loves good cheer and the embellishments 



