depend. Yet most members of the working classes are disabled, for want of a ratepaying qualification, from voting either for town councillors in boroughs, or for vestrymen in London, or for guardians of the poor.'

Thus we are brought to the same conclusion by every route, that only through the working classes themselves taking control of the administration, and looking after the management of the wealth which they produce, can any permanent reform be looked for. The Poor Law has lasted for just three hundred years, and only now that the wealthy are trying to do away with it by one plan or another, are the workers slowly awakening to the truth that the sums spent in relieving the miserable, come really, in the first instance, from the labour of those very unfortunates, in common with the other members of their class; that, therefore, to look upon such relief merely from the ratepayers' point of view, or to reckon it as charity and almsgiving, is to forget the truth that labour is the source of all wealth, and has the right, if it had the power, to take all instead of resting content with a pittance.

The Poor Laws, then, whether left to be administered by the county, the parish, the municipality, the union, or taken, as would be best, under the direct control of the State, form, if looked at without middle-class prejudice, a valuable starting-point in connection with other State departments, for that organisation of labour combined with relief of the distressed, and provision for the sick and aged, which, under full control by universal suffrage, will supplant our present competitive system. No doubt the tendency in parliament at the moment is all the other way. But the very pressure resulting from the supremacy of middle-class

* Cobden Club. "Local Taxation,” p. 66.

ideas will as surely lead to their overthrow as the feudal system was broken at the time of its greatest apparent power. It is true that the bourgeois, like the baron, will not disappear all at once; but in the one case as in the other, the new development is coming from the class most despised by the ruling body-from the residuum, the mob, the proletariat, whom ratepayers and vestrymen, middle-class economists and capitalist statesmen cannot speak of without sneering and contempt. The very success which has attended the training and feeding of the little street arabs on board well-managed vessels shows how the moment any real attempt is made at organisation the growing physical deterioration is checked. Paupers breed paupers as the weakly breed the weakly. In a community such as ours the proportion of both would become infinitesimal in the course of two or three generations of good feeding and good education. The Poor Laws which grew up as a necessity in the cruel system of unrestrained middle-class competition will become useless in the gradually evolving period of working co-operation for all.

CHAPTER XII.

INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MOVEMENTS.

AT the time of the great national upheavals of 1848-49, when French, Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and Croats were all fighting their way, as they hoped, to some sort of republic, or more less complete independence and unity, there were some in every country who longed and strove for a deeper and more thorough revolution than any which could be the result of mere republican or national risings. The Socialist party in France which, from Babœuf to Blanqui and Louis Blanc, from Rousseau to Saint Simon and Fourier, had never lacked men of action as well as writers and thinkers to champion the cause, scarcely grasped the full idea of such international action, or at any rate the few who did so were unable to make their views prevail at the critical time. In 1848, 10,000 Frenchmen fell fighting in the streets of Paris for Socialist principles, but there was no general movement outside in their support, and the attempt failed. Notwithstanding the anarchist Proudhon's famous phrase, "la proprieté c'est le vol," notwithstanding Lamennais' powerful denunciations of the capitalist class from a very different point of view, in spite of all the efforts of Louis Blanc, Ledru Rollin, and Victor Hugo, coupled with the more earnest and determined agitation of the noble, self-sacrificing Blanqui,* in the face of the fact that the workers of Paris,

The true greatness of this noble enthusiast will be better appre

Lyons, and Marseilles were thoroughly imbued with the communistic teaching, Socialism failed in France because the time had not fully come for success, because the attempts were organised on no scientific basis, and because the leaders did not take sufficient account, even in the partial experiments which they made, either of the strength of the opposing forces or of the incapacity of the people, after years of separate work, to make common cause for the general advantage.

National workshops, no matter how sound the principle on which they were started—and there were many defects in the scheme of Louis Blanc, even from an economical point of view-could not be carried on successfully save in close connection with national agriculture and national distribution of products. And France, with its millions of small peasant proprietors, the hardest, the most griping, the most individual of men, was perhaps the nation least suited to begin such an experiment. France had passed far beyond the stage of village communal life, and yet had attained but in a small degree the level of the great machine, socialised industry. Paris certainly could not be a socialist centre by itself, when the city depended for its well-being upon the sale of its goods on the markets of the world, and was surrounded by a people each of whom was fighting for his own hand.

That great struggle for emancipation failed. The time was not ripe; and five-and-thirty years later, we can see that even yet it has scarcely come. Ignorance and race hatred, national pride and difference of language still

ciated as years go on. No French revolutionary leader will, I venture to think, stand so high in the eyes of posterity as he. Out of his long life he spent forty years in gaol. All the working-class of Paris, who could, followed his corpse to its grave.

shut the workers out from the great field of international co-operation. Yet there were in 1848 Socialists of established character and reputation in every country in Europe who were ready to make common cause with their brethren elsewhere. In England-though the fact is now too often forgotten or conveniently pushed aside-there was perhaps more practical Socialism than in any other nation. For the teaching of Robert Owen, Sadler, and Oastler, to say nothing of others, had been very widely accepted. Robert Owen held out his hand to the French Socialists, and wrote to them some remarkable letters. Others were in constant correspondence with advanced newspapers in France and Germany; more than one of the leaders in Ireland was on good terms with English revolutionists, as well as with their continental brethren. Further afield, Mazzini, Kossuth, and their fellow-revolutionists were ready to accept assistance in their work from men of any nationality, though their energies were directed chiefly to the enfranchisement of their own countries from the yoke of the stranger; and Mazzini, though a noble moral teacher, had no sympathy with the great class struggle which underlies all national movements, and will end by reducing them all to insignificance.

The necessity for absolutely united action upon the part of the workers in all civilised countries against the capitalist class and the governments which were then as now merely boards of directors elected in the interest of that class, was first made plain in a scientific form in the famous Communist Manifesto signed by Marx and Engels, already referred to more than once, which was printed and published in 1847. This manifesto is by no means written in a popular form. It is rather a historical and philosophical disquisition upon the growth of the bourgeoisie and the