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 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, 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.

or

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

struction of machinery, Chartist organized denunciation and physicalforce movements against the capitalists had no effect. Within a century or less, Great Britain was revolutionized from an agricultural country into being almost entirely a nation of manufacturers and profiteers. The peasant became a landless wage 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

became, as M. Clemenceau expressed it to me some ten years ago, a bourgeois class. They accepted, that is to say, the whole scheme of wagedom, capitalism, and profiteering as a permanent social system. Their hope of emancipation before 1848 had lain in some sort of return to preindustrial conditions; from 1848 to 1914 they aspired, not to uplift the whole disinherited class (practically ninety per cent of the entire people), but to become members, as individuals, of the section that existed by trading upon differences of value. Not even the spread of the great Coöperative movement, or the continuous Socialist agitation from the beginning of 1881, or even the affiliation of the Labor Party to the International Socialist Party, and the voting strength displayed at the elections of 1906, could

turn the tide in favor of Socialist ideas.

At the beginning of the war in 1914, the general aspect of affairs was much the same as it had been for the previous generation. True, on the one hand, working-class combinations had grown far more numerous and formidable. True, also, on the other, that the combinations of vast capitalist enterprises had utterly refuted the old theories of individual competition as the salvation of society and the cause of all progress. True, lastly, that state interference had greatly increased. But neither the working classes nor the dominant profiteering and landlord classes understood how far this unconscious reintegration of industrial anarchy had gone. Still less did either side comprehend that capitalism as a system had reached its culminating point, was already tottering to its fall, and would prove itself wholly incapable of dealing with a great national emergency. To-day, the entire community has learned these

facts-through the agency of the war. State control, however partially, incompetently, and reluctantly administered, is replacing individual competition in every important branch of our national life.

The history of this latest phase of social evolution has been much the same in the various countries which have attained to a similar stage of the industrial evolution. The United States of America, notwithstanding the enormous and fruitful territory it has had to colonize, in spite also of the fact that not less than half its population of 110,000,000 is still directly connected with the cultivation of the soil, has, in not a few directions, run ahead of the old world. Nowhere has capital organized itself with such marvelous capacity for rapid improvement of processes and the determination to scrap' all but the most perfect means of extracting ores, of dealing with and distributing agricultural products, manufacturing on a large scale, standardizing its appliances and products in order to save labor and cheapen selling values; while at the same time trusts and combines on an unprecedented scale have made use of the vast power acquired by common action to crush competition and to uphold prices. On the other side of the Atlantic, also, as on this, the laboring class has endeavored to meet the relentless force of organized capital by combinations of its own. Threats uttered by the railway men to hold up the entire trade of the country practically forced Mr. Wilson to use the great Federal power with which he is invested on behalf of the men, in order to secure for the workers in that department an eight-hour day by direct state action.

It is obvious that this is only a beginning. No great nation could