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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



than in the mere absence of private capitalists. 

 It would be a world in which individuals would 

 not fashion society, but society would fashion the 

 individual. Personal initiative would be sternly 

 repressed, lest it should be the commencement 

 of a distinction between one man and another, 

 leading on to distinctions between one class and 

 another class. The arms to oppose these con- 

 spiracies for turning the earth into a barrack 

 must be sought in the instinct of individuality 

 to be found in all classes — the working-class as 

 well as the hourgeoisie. Workmen, from the 

 fault of other classes in dealing with them, and 

 from the passion of conflict, have been ready to 

 abdicate much of their independence. But they 

 do not love, any more than their present supe- 

 riors, to have their lives laid out and arranged 

 for them. When the employer should have ceased 

 to stand between them and the authority of their 

 own community, they would speedily be ready to 

 rebel against an intolerable despotism. The con- 

 test threatened is no longer, as in England, the 

 old claim of the workman to receive a larger 

 share of the combined profits of his work and the 

 capital which sets it in motion. It is not even a 

 fresh campaign in the long war of class against 

 class. It is the war between the determination 

 of the individual to regulate and develop freely 

 and fully his own existence, and the determina- 

 tion of men like Marx, and Licbknecht, and Most, 

 who have constituted themselves his leaders and 

 mouth-pieces, that the whole section of mankind 

 within the range of their authority shall frame 

 and mould their lives after a given pattern. The 

 tendency of these men's teaching has been ever 

 more and more toward centralization. Their ob- 

 ject is to weld the working-class into a solid, co- 

 hesive mass, which they shall be able to hurl 

 with crushing force against modern society. 



The minority of Internationalist delegates at 

 the Ghent Congress of 187Y in vain urged the 

 right of workmen to form voluntary groups, each 

 of which should hold and administer its own 

 proportion of accumulated capital. Its enemies 

 call the system " anarchy," and its friends " Col- 

 lectivism." It may be remembered that the man 

 H6del, before he joined or pretended to join the 

 Christian Socialists, described himself as an 

 anarchist. Under the system of Collectivism 

 each group would have a manager elected by the 

 members of the group, living their life and con- 

 trolled by their voices. A rival Congress to the 

 Ghent Congress, which styled itself the " Inter- 

 nationalist Working-Men's Association," was 

 held at Verviers in the same month of Septem- 



ber, 1877, as the Ghent Congress. Its delegates 

 represented the same views a3 the minority at 

 Ghent, and they put out a programme of their 

 own. The foundation of it is the same as for 

 their adversaries. It claims the expropriation of 

 the owners of all capital, and the abolition of 

 individual property. The difference between the 

 Verviers programme and the Ghent or German 

 Socialist programme is that the former contem- 

 plates the conversion of " the instruments of la- 

 bor" into collective property of groups of labor- 

 ers. Separate states and separate representative 

 governments, it was explained at Verviers, must 

 be aboli?hed, the society which is to take their 

 place being composed of a net of federations o\ 

 laborers, united together for their special needs 

 and the special purposes they propose to accom- 

 plish. This view was put forward at Ghent as 

 well as at Verviers. But at Ghent it was rejected 

 by the majority of delegates, the so-called " Au- 

 thoritarians," who accepted the view adopted 

 two years before by the Gotha Congress of Ger- 

 man workmen. Spanish workmen, to judge from 

 the tone of their representatives at the Ghent 

 Congress, remain suspicious of the benefit labor 

 is to derive from the substitution of other chiefs 

 of the state for royal and noble rulers, with the 

 mere difference that they declare themselves rep- 

 resentatives of the working-class. Chalain, a 

 Spanish delegate, said " he understood that 

 royal and other sinecures would be suppressed, 

 and that faithful mandataries of the workers 

 would be employed to administer the state and 

 the communes ; but," he asked, " would not these 

 agents themselves, by the authority of their 

 places, have a preponderance fatal to equality ? " 

 The same tone of feeling breathes through the 

 addresses of the representative of the French- 

 speaking cantons of Switzerland ; but the Ger- 

 man-Swiss and the Italian working-men are en- 

 thusiastic advocates for a state monopoly of 

 power and property. The English delegates at 

 Ghent expressed the same view, but it may well 

 be doubted how far they can be regarded as re- 

 flecting the opinion of English working-men. We 

 should be surprised to find one out of a hundred 

 English workmen comprehending, much less de- 

 siring, a condition of things in which there 

 w.ould be no private capitalist to pay him his 

 Saturday evening's wages. Englishmen are ap- 

 parently far from ripe for a polity under which 

 their pay and their work should be measured out 

 to them by a working-men's municipality, deriv- 

 ing its sanction from a working-men's parliament 

 presided over by a working-men's executive. If 



