PRIMITIVE PROPERTY AXD MODERN SOCIALISM. 



U9 



English workmen cherish such aspirations, they 

 must be very much more reticent than Germans, 

 or Swiss, or Belgians. But it is in the nature of 

 things that, when men have resigned their con- 

 sciences into other men's keeping, they should 

 find themselves committed to enterprises of 

 which they do not understand the mere mot 

 d'ordre. 



Even German socialists, we trust, cannot be 

 generally in sympathy with frenzied atrocities 

 like the crimes of Hodel and Nobiling. But the 

 whole tendency and principle of their organiza- 

 tion is to commit suicide of their individual voli- 

 tion. It remains, we rejoice to be able to think, 

 yet to be proved that the attempts on the life of 

 the emperor were more than the results of dis- 

 tempered vanity, which would have plunged a 

 nation into mourning to become the world's talk. 

 Such crimes, however, are unhappily not uncon- 

 nected with principles accepted by some hundreds 

 of thousands, or, it may be, millions, of Euro- 

 pean working-men. The one goal the modern 

 chiefs of the Social Democrats place before their 

 followers is the conquest of the state. The con- 

 trol of the state once in the hands of these irre- 

 sponsible and absolute potentates, all is supposed 

 to be gained. How the powers of the state are 

 to be used to secure the happiness even of work- 

 men, no Liebknecht or Most seems to consider, 

 and no workman seems to care. " The libera- 

 tion of labor," says the Gotha programme, " must 

 be the work of the laborer class." In opposition 

 to that class, continues the programme, " all 

 other classes are only a reactionary mass." A 

 German workman is taught to scowl at all con- 

 stituted authorities as simply combined to tram- 

 ple on him, and to keep him out of his inheri- 

 tance. Weak brains, such as Hbdel's, filled with 

 spite at all better oif than himself, or Nobiling's, 

 who, sprung from a higher class, affiliated him- 

 self to a lower, apparently from stung vanity, 

 catch greedily at so easy a solution of their so- 

 cial problem as a rifleshot at the chief of the 

 state appears to offer. They do not see the 

 foundations on which the old man's throne rests ; 

 they imagine that it needs but a dozen such out- 

 rages to remove out of the path of Social Democ- 

 racy all its rivals for the sway of the state. The 

 trained leaders of the party must know that, if 

 all the royal families of Europe were extirpated, 

 the classes which represent capital would not, till 

 they were extirpated also, suffer the power of the 

 state to be monopolized by the working-class. 

 But their followers and dupes are fascinated by 

 the apparently simple suggestion that, if the 

 101 



stronghold of the state be once captured, the 

 victory is won for labor. In Germany, no less 

 than in Russia itself, the state has been allowed 

 to impersonate the whole life of the nation ; and 

 many German workmen doubtless believe, with 

 Hodel, that the solid work of ages could be sub- 

 verted by a bullet. 



The long series of German statesmen who 

 have labored to concentrate the entire working 

 of German life in the hands of the bureaucracy is 

 to blame for the state of mind which has pre- 

 pared the soil for Socialist teaching. Prince Bis- 

 marck is to blame most of all. In his eager de- 

 sire to have the national strength and force ready 

 for a blow at whatever rival may threaten Ger- 

 man unity, he, outdoing his predecessors at the 

 head of German politics, has helped to disguise 

 the truth that the state is nothing but machinery 

 to enable the various elements in the national life 

 to accomplish their own proper work without mu- 

 tual conflict. In Prince Bismarck's ideal polity, 

 the state would administer everything, from a 

 university to a railway. The German workman's 

 inference is that, if his chiefs were in Prince Bis- 

 marck's and his imperial master's places, they 

 would administer everything, with this difference, 

 that all would be administered with a view solely 

 to the working-man's benefit. The difficulty which 

 at present meets German statesmen in their plans 

 for checking the development of the Socialist can- 

 cer is, that German Liberals have a rooted suspi- 

 cion that Prince Bismarck desires to make that a 

 pretext for confirming the state autocracy. How 

 to unite the powers of German society against 

 the conspiracies of the working-men's ringlead- 

 ers, without simply abdicating into the hands of 

 the bureaucracy all the independent energies of 

 German life, is the difficulty the new German Par- 

 liament will have to solve. Whatever the means, 

 some means must be devised for teaching German 

 workmen that no coup de main will make them 

 supreme. Germany will not look on philosophi- 

 cally while first one man and then another, with 

 brain heated by Socialist exhortations to storm 

 the citadel of the state, shoots down its princes. 

 Prince Bismarck tells the nation, and is prepared 

 to tell Europe at large, that if it confide the task 

 to him he will secure it against such outrages. 

 He asks nothing better. We believe that meas- 

 ures of general repression, such as he would pro- 

 pose, would only turn the sore inward, and con- 

 vert Germany into a hot-bed of carbonari. In 

 any case, his triumph would be fatal to the bud- 

 ding hope of German Liberalism. But the sole 

 alternative for a final confirmation of the yoke 



