have to sell, as their sole means of relief from crushing burdens. Similarly, high prices for the goods which are the output of their interminable toil on small home industries during the long winter months can alone give hope of squeezing a little better wage from their employers or the middlemen.

On the other hand, the new wageearning townsfolk want to get those necessaries of life which the peasants offer as cheaply as possible, so that their own scanty wages may go farther. And the land cultivators cannot escape from the effects of an economic pressure, the development of which they can neither understand nor cope with, and the expansion of which they are unable to resist. This was a serious situation even in peaceful and quiet periods. Amid revolution and war, it becomes nothing short of appalling. Though the drain to the West for interest on foreign loans and invested capital, amounting to not less than 55,000,000l. a year out of a total value of exports, estimated in 1912 at 160,000,000l., was temporarily suspended in 1914, owing to the impossibility of exportation, the pressure of taxation on the mass of the peasantry was not reduced to that extent. And, from the moment when the revolution began, the necessity for funds forced the Government to issue paper money in excess of any possible power to meet it in cash. In consequence, the value of the rouble, remaining, for the sale of agricultural produce, at the old amount of two shillings before the war (as against the nominal amount of three shillings), fell for the purchasing of articles required by the peasants for tillage, etc., to the level of sixpence or less, and the price of such articles rose accordingly to an unprecedented height. Even the seizure of the unredeemed

land, or the repudiation of redemption payments, could not obviate the economic crisis. The peasants, naturally enough, would not sell their grain, upon which at least they could exist, for a price reckoned in paper money at its old value, when they could get none of their necessaries except at inordinate rates for the deteriorating paper thus paid to them. Therefore, the real Russian Land Revolution is beginning under conditions which may bring about first anarchy and then reaction. Yet production for profit instead of use, the antagonism of town and country, crushing taxation, and deteriorating paper money-all these only hasten the greater economic change. Reaction itself, even with a full force of a reorganized army behind it, could not withstand the march of economic development. The peasantry demand the land, and they will get it. They are refusing to fight the foreign invaders at the front, in order that they may not forego their share of the redistribution at the rear. The entire peasantry of Russia, with all the differences that separate them, have in the main the same desires. In the Ukraine, with its old-settled population and eagerness for national recognition and local self-government; in Siberia, where immigrants are increasing more rapidly than in Canada ; in the rich but deteriorating blackearth region, and in the poor soil of the forest districts, the people demand the ownership of the land, light taxation, relief from usury, and the removal of irresponsible bureaucrats. However ignorant they may be, they all understand that programme, and yearn for its accomplishment.

The civilized world has, in fact, entered upon a period of unrest which greatly transcends in extent, as well as in importance, the European dis

turbances of 1848. Probably it will far surpass even the epoch of the French Revolution in its influence upon the destinies of mankind. But the character of the transformations brought about depends upon the stage of economic and social development that has been reached in every nation affected. Certainly, the general movement will be towards Collectivism and Socialism; but it is absurd to compare vast rural nations such as Russia, China, or even France, with Great Britain, Germany, America, or Belgium, where the huge machine industry, with its complementary evolution of Trusts, Combines, and State Control, has developed almost to its full extent. In the former countries there are several steps of social readjustment to be mounted, before the capitalist system of production of goods for profit, through exchange on the world market, gets far enough to render the socialization of the means of creating wealth, and the consequent production for use instead of profit, upon an enormous scale, not only possible and desirable but inevitable. Japan has shown us that a nation of our time may, in forty years, pass through changes which Western Europe required centuries to traverse. But such a rapid transformation is very rare; and in any event, quickly or slowly, the successive stages must be realized and lived through before the ultimate reconstitution is attained. That is why revolution in a country such as Russia, just emerging from what economists call natural production, involves modifications in ideas and in social affairs totally different from what revolution in a highly-developed industrial country, such as England or Germany, would produce.

Nothing is more remarkable in the history of the human race than the

unconsciousness of mankind in their progress from one period of social development to another. Even a hundred and fifty years ago, or less, the greatest brains of our own period understood no more of approaching social changes than the ablest philosophers of antiquity did about the rise of slavery or its decline. The conditions which made for slave owning had created a form of society apparently so permanent that any crucial crucial change seemed impossible. Religion gave no hint; ethics led nowhither; only economics, the lessons of which were entirely unapprehended, at last enforced a change and compelled the gradual transformation. The power of the great landlords and slave owners of Rome and antiquity generally declined, not by the invasion of the barbarians from without, but by causes which silently sapped the edifice within.

It

A really complete revolution may be accomplished without bloodshed, at the critical time, when all is ready for the change. But the revolts against an existing form of domination, before that stage has been reached, have been invariably unsuccessful and often accompanied by horrible cruelty and massacres. is just the failure of such revolts, when they come before their time, which compels us to regard the process of class domination through the centuries in the light of a natural phenomenon, unmoved by feeling and uninfluenced by morality of any kind. The inevitable change marches slowly and relentlessly onward over the heaps of slaughtered human bodies piled beneath the Juggernaut car of economic advance.

The risings of the slaves against Roman slaveholders in Italy, Sicily, and the Provinces were fully justifiable. But their repeated efforts to

obtain freedom failed to win any general amelioration of their condition. To all appearance slavery in both East and West was a permanent institution. Its continuance in full vigor depended, however, upon causes that were beginning to disappear; thus its base was rotting even when it seemed at the height of its power. The two elements which enabled slave cultivation and slave production generally to hold their own were the cheapness of slaves themselves on the market and the cheapness of their keep as compared with the wealth they produced. Cheapness on the market depended upon the supply of slaves being kept up by conquest by domestic breeding; and supply by conquest was the far more important source. When this failed, the value of slaves inevitably rose. Slave labor, too, is always relatively inefficient. The exhaustion of soil, which almost invariably accompanied its use, by degrees increased both the cost of production and the price of maintenance. Moreover, the difficulty and expense of replacement rendered greater care of the slaves and less pressure upon them essential. Hence the labor of free men became more and more important, and slave production less and less profitable.

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Therefore manumission gained ground rapidly. Only the very rich could afford to acquire or to keep large bodies of slaves. What all the valor of Spartacus and his fellows had failed to achieve before economic forms were ripe was slowly but silently obtained by the irresistible force of economic progress. Risings there were; the invasion of the barbarians may have hastened the destruction of slavery, though, speaking generally, their influence was definitely reactionary; but the chief forces which brought about the change were the

almost unrecognized modifications of the social conditions mentioned. Then it was that ethical considerations previously disregarded-rebuking the ownership of man by man-began to have their effect upon the slave owners as individuals and as a class. It became a good moral deed to release bondmen from the yoke, as soon as it proved socially profitable in most cases.

With the general break-up of order and organization, a new form of servitude, serfdom, was gradually established. It eventually fell in the same way. Serfs, whose fathers and ancestors had become the bondmen of their feudal lords, were little better off than their social ancestors, the slaves. Here, again, a similar course was followed wherever the feudal system, with its complicated nexus of personal relations, was established. French villeins and peasants, German Bauers and Leibeigeners, English serfs and bondmen rose in revolt century after century. All in vain. Time after time their attacks were suppressed with a ruthless cruelty quite equal to that shown by any slave owner general of ancient days. The men whose names stand out in history as the noblest, most courageous, and most magnanimous in their dealings with those of their own caste, distinguished themselves above all by the hideous ferocity and love of torture which they glutted upon their unruly peasants. Church and Law, Science and Philosophy took sides with the men in possession. For centuries neither morality nor religion intervened.

Here, again, so long as the lords played an active and useful part in the social life of the period, so long as natural production for use was still the determining factor in the national existence, so long did serfdom continue side by side with yeoman cultivators

gaining ground in the country, and free guilds making their way in the cities. In England, where the emancipation was probably first completed, it took more than three centuries to transform the serfdom which was established before William the Conqueror into peasant ownership under various forms. The soil, which the serfs universally regarded as their own, was gradually released to them and their personal freedom secured. But very gradually. The mills of economic emancipation ground slowly, but they ground exceeding small; the forces of unrest and revolt failed to hasten the pace until unrecognized causes rendered enfranchisement certain. Once again, ethics and religion played quite a subordinate part until economic influences had done their work. Then the Church, which had performed the same service for chattel slaves, shrewdly preached as a religious duty that emancipation which had already become economically and ethically inevitable. Even so, the remains of actual serfdom were to be found in Scotland so late as the eighteenth century. In Russia and Poland serfdom remained in full force, despite innumerable risings, until the latter half of the nineteenth; and even then emancipation was enacted from above as a result of obvious social necessity. Unfortunately, in this latter case, as already noticed, nominal individual freedom did not carry with it the actual possession of the land.

Many, however, still argue and attempt to act as if organized, or even unorganized, force could anticipate events, ahead of economic and social development, and at the same time hinder forcible reaction. The favorite instance of this is the French Revolution. In that case at least we are frequently told that force did 'act as the midwife of progress, delivering

the old society pregnant with the new.' But this statement will not bear examination. Apart from the historical truth that, in the centuries prior to the Revolution itself, serfdom and the power of the nobles had been greatly weakened, what actually took place shows conclusively that force did not realize that which its advocates set out to achieve. There were far more people slaughtered by the White Terror than by the Red. The ancient nobility fell, not because of the vigor of the attack made upon it, but because it had already forfeited its social position by its own action; and the class emancipated was not the agricultural producing class, but that section of the people economically ready and administratively trained to succeed to power, namely, the Tiers Etat, or the bourgeoisie. Even when, after the downfall of Napoleon's military reaction, the Allied troops were withdrawn, some sixty years elapsed before a French Republic was definitely constituted; and that Republic also is a bourgeois Republic to this day.

The most reactionary annalists of the period admit that the downfall of the Ancienne Noblesse was due to economic causes rather than to violence. The old system of privilege and exemption from national taxation. could not work any longer. It was not the licentiousness, extravagance, and cruelty of the aristocracy which brought them down. So long as they chiefly lived on their estates, like the Junkers of to-day, and conducted their own business, all this turpitude, however objectionable morally, failed to shake their power. When, however, they betook themselves to Court, managed their estates through agents, and combined with the Church to fleece their countrymen for no advantage to the rising middle class,

they fell, because they had become not only vicious but obviously useless. They could not even handle effectively the means of resistance at their hand. 'Why did you run away?' the fugitive nobles were asked at Cologne. 'Nous étions des lâches,' was the reply. They were not physically cowards-both men and women proved this at the crisis of their fate; but they felt that their position could not be defended, so they lacked the moral courage to hold on. So strong also was the reaction, so slow the growth of the new forms, that, great as was the political transformation from the commencement of the revolution in 1789 to the restoration of Louis XVIII in 1815, the restored aristocrats were able to obtain some compensation from the National Assembly for the properties of which they had been deprived.

The same causes made themselves felt in the great development of capitalist production and factory industry which, beginning in its recognized shape in England about the middle of the eighteenth century, has spread and is still spreading over the civilized world. This change moved far more rapidly than any previous social modification. But it went forward in this island, as well as later in the United States, without any national superintendence or control. The horrors thus engendered fully equaled any of the chattel-slave or serf period. Children of tender years were never deliberately worked to death for the profit of the slave owner or the feudal lord, as they were by capitalist employers at the end of the eighteenth and during the first half of the nineteenth century. But the resistance of the wage earners proved as useless as the previous risings against slave owners, nobles, and land expropriators had been futile. Luddite anarchist de

earner; the land population was drafted into cities; and the cities grew up with the most crowded and miserable dens in which a pauperized proletariat had ever been housed. Such limitations as there were to the employers' power to work women and children to death were chiefly due to opposition made by the landowners to the factory-owner class that was depriving them of political control.

Thus the transformation from home production and domestic industry to importation from abroad and great factory industry-one of the greatest economic and social revolutions ever known in any country-was achieved in Great Britain, not certainly without much perturbation and discontent culminating in armed violence, but, relatively to the crucial character of the change effected, with little bloodshed. Once more, individual revolts against economic conditions failed; for the victory of the capitalist and profiteering class was complete. During eighty years, from 1765 to 1848, the class-war between capital and labor was open and avowed. In the latter year capital won, owing to the gold discoveries, free trade, and the emigration of the most vigorous portions of the population.

Thenceforward the struggle took a different shape. First strikes, and then, very gradually, political action, carried on the strife, but with little advantage to the workers. They adopted the theories of the profiteering class; and the English proletariat