than has hitherto been accorded to it. It has already received tokens of that increased notoriety, more agreeable to the vanity probably than to the comfort of its members. It has been placed under the ban of the State both in France and Spain; and even in republican Switzerland its foreign members have been excluded from one of the cantons. In England we take no legal notice of such societies. The work which is elsewhere undertaken by the law, is done among us by opinion. Shortly after the bloody close of the insurrection, the Executive of the Association issued the address mentioned above, which contained, among other sentiments of the kind, an infamous defence of the murder of the prisoners of La Roquette. This was signed by all the members of the General Council. Most of them were persons wholly unknown; but two of them, Mr. Odger and Mr. Lucraft, have occasionally solicited the suffrages of English constituencies. It is a gratifying proof, both of the power and the actual soundness of English opinion, that these two men were compelled, after a short delay, to set themselves right, by an explanation, somewhat lame in its details, of the mode in which their signatures had been obtained, and by the more practical step of a withdrawal from the General Council. No other withdrawals have appeared, though there were other English signatures. It is not satisfactory to think that an organisation exists which should be able to persuade any Englishman, however obscure, to the sanction of sentiments so revolting. Whether the Internationale is a great political power or not remains to be seen; but that it is a great moral power is certain, for it is able to efface the natural instincts of Englishmen upon the subject of assassination. Whatever the political station of this Association may be, it has certainly reached that position very rapidly. Its history is a brief one. It is supposed to be one of the benefits we owe to the International Exhibition of 1862. The defeat of the Paris workmen. by Cavaignac in June, 1848, had disposed of many of their most dangerous leaders, and had driven out of their heads for a period the wild ideas of the Socialist school. But as time went on the severity of the punishment was forgotten. The architectural extravagances of which the Emperor was guilty in the vain hope of conciliating them, had drawn large numbers of their class to Paris, who more than filled up the gaps that had been made in their ranks in 1848. Returning prosperity re-awakened the old ambitions. New visions of revenge upon the middle classes began to float before their minds, and some of them, excited by the spectacle of what great combinations for the purpose of raising wages had been able to effect in England, conceived the idea of founding a vast organisation which should embrace the workmen of all countries in its scope. Brought over to England

by

by the Exhibition of 1862, they met a number of the more disaffected artisans of London, and projects of combination on a large scale were freely discussed. No actual step was, however, taken until the autumn of 1864. Much by that time had happened to encourage the agitators among the artisans. The victory of the North in the American struggle inspired them with the confident but not very logical hope that all democracies, in all causes, would be able to conquer as completely. It was the culminating point of the financial mania; capital was bidding high for labour, and the moment seemed to have come for labour to make its own terms. And, above all, Mr. Gladstone (then Lord Palmerston's Chancellor of the Exchequer) had just placed himself at the head of the workmen's movement, by confiding to Mr. Odger's deputation his hitherto unsuspected indignation at Lord Palmerston's postponement of a Reform Bill. Acting under the influence of these inspiriting circumstances, Mr. Odger and some of his friends proceeded upon the ideas of 1862 to found an International Association for the Emancipation of the Working Class,' of which he himself was the first President-a post which he appears to have retained till recently.

At first the progress of the Association was not very rapid, nor did its doctrines reach their full development. At the outset its object seems to have been merely to remove one of the main difficulties which hindered the success of strikes. It is the practice of the employers, when they cannot come to terms with their workmen, to import foreign workmen in their place. The Internationale was set on foot to parry this manœuvre, by' picketing' foreign labour markets, as well as English. This duty it appears to have performed down to the present time-as we have seen in the case of the Newcastle struggle with considerable, though incomplete, success. So practical a conception did not satisfy the seething imaginations of the foreign conspirators; but the English workmen were at the time too intent upon the Reform agitation to give their attention to broader schemes. But after this movement had triumphed, the doctrines of the Association became more pronounced and its extension more rapid. It spread rapidly through all the manufacturing works of Belgium and French Switzerland; and, as the vigour of the Imperial police began to decline, branches were established in the principal towns in France. The Trades' Unions of England and Germany have maintained friendly relations with it, and, no doubt, for the purpose of strikes, the various organisations work heartily together. How far in either country its more extravagant doctrines receive support from the working men is very doubtful. It is said that the large number of Gerinan names which appear among the lists of its most active members are derived mainly from the population

population of the Rhenish cities, whose Teutonic lineage is open to much question. A strong presumption of revolutionary tendencies is established by experience against every large town which dates its origin from the old Roman colonies. With respect to the part taken by English workmen in its operations, the most satisfactory thing that can be said is, that at the various congresses which have been held by the Association, the larger number of the representatives of England have been men with names of a singularly un-English flavour, such as Eccarius, Jung, Cohn, Matens, Lessner, and Dupont. As M. Dupont himself observes, 'The English have all the materials necessary for the social revolution; but what they lack is the spirit of generalisation and the revolutionary passion. . . What folly, then-nay, what a crime— to allow it to fall into hands purely English.' †

The numbers of the Association have been very variously estimated. In the trial of June, 1870, the Procureur Imperial assumed their entire number at about 800,000, of whom he assigned a tenth part to this country. M. Testut, who professes to have devoted numerous researches to the subject, fixes the total for Europe and America at five millions; M. Albert Richard, the principal champion of Socialism at Lyons, claims a following for the Internationale of not less than seven millions. These extreme figures are probably fanciful, and the great divergence between the various estimates indicates that they all rest, more or less, upon conjecture. Whether the Society disposes of the large means that are sometimes claimed for it is doubtful. It is certain that more than one strike in France and Switzerland which it has supported-e. g. Creuzot, Neuville, Fourchambaud, Bâle-has failed for want of funds. But that its numbers are very large and that its propaganda is carried on with great vigour cannot be questioned. It has about twenty newspapers in its interest on the Continent, besides two or three in this country. The literary championship which it commands is probably as good as the extravagance of the doctrines which have to be defended will allow; but the writing necessarily consists more of vehement declamation than of any attempt at tranquil argument. That such doctrines as the Internationale sustains can be preached with applause to a vast number of men, of whom many, at least, are well educated, is, after all, its most remarkable distinction, and will remain, whatever the practical issue may be, one of the intellectual phenomena of the nineteenth century. We have often during the last two generations have had mad speculations upon social reconstruction from the pens of eccentric writers. The peculiarity of the present state of things is that their views have been adopted and improved upon by a whole class.

*Testut, pp. 124, 135, 145.

† Ibid.

p. 237.

So

So far as can be gathered from the declamation which infects the resolutions of their congresses and their formal addresses almost as much as the articles in their newspapers, it is against the capitalist that their chief anger is directed. Of course they wish to exterminate the landlord as well as the capitalist. Society has a right,' so runs the resolution of their Congress at Bâle, 'to abolish individual ownership of the soil: and it is necessary that the ownership of the soil should be resumed by the community.' The same fate awaits all mines, quarries, railways, canals, telegraphs, coal-mines, machines of all kinds, and all other instruments of labour.* In the mean time, until this happy consummation is brought about, no employer is to use a machine until he has first compensated all the workmen whom it may displace. The demand, however, for the seizure of all immovable property, though it appears in every statement of their objects, is not the urgent necessity of the hour. The landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist.'† 'The landlords are the more remote, the capitalists the more direct antagonists of the working men.' It is the middle-class capitalist to whom they attribute their present sufferings and whom they are most anxious to destroy. All middle-class politics, whatever their colour or their name, can have at bottom but one objectthe maintenance of middle-class domination; and middle-class domination is the slavery of the proletariat.'§ The law gives to the capitalist the right to reduce the proletaire to slavery by famine.' In truth we see everywhere capital ruling, speculating, warring against the workman. The capitalists of to-day are the successors of the slave-owners of ancient times and of the feudal lords of the middle ages." 'T

And accordingly, in many of their publications, 'slave owner' is the ordinary term used to designate the man who is wicked enough to possess capital and to use it in employing other people. The case is put perhaps, as favourably to the workmen as it can be put, by Mr. Frederic Harrison :

The people of Paris believe not in any God or any man. But they have a religion of their own: and for that religion they are prepared to die. That religion is the faith that capital and its holders must adapt themselves to nobler uses, or they had better cease to exist. . . . Little knowing how to end it, or what it might be that would save them, they have thrown up this tremendous yet wild veto on the absolute reign of capital. It is their protest against the selfish anti-social independence of wealth.'

* Congress of Brussels, Res. 3, 6. + Address of the General Council,' p. 20. Address of the General Council, p. 16.

Paris Section, 1870,' ap. Testut, p. 82.

'Section of Geneva,' ap. Testut, p. 260. Vol. 131.-No. 262.

20

§ Testut, p. 13.

Mr.

Mr. Harrison gives rather too grand a colouring to the sentiments of his favourites. They do not in the least contemplate that capital should 'cease to exist'-whatever their view in respect to its holders may be. Such would certainly be the result of their success; but what they themselves propose is that the capital should pass into their own hands. As the Council of the Internationale itself puts it:

'The Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators.'

The ultimate objects of the movement are stated with abundant clearness. They amount simply to this: that the workmen shall have land without buying it, capital without accumulating it, machinery and the instruments of labour without paying for them. But when we come to enquire into the measures by which these beneficent ends are to be accomplished, their language loses its precision. We get nothing but a haze of declamation. The only step proposed by them which can be called practical, is the entire abolition of the right of inheritance. No human being is to be allowed to inherit, or receive by bequest, anything from any other human being. If,' says M. Richard, parents more active and more intelligent than others, and who had amassed some fortune, were allowed to set up a special privilege in favour of their children by bequeathing this fortune to them, solidarity would be struck at in the very heart.' This is the general tone of the writers in socialist newspapers. It embodies much the same feeling as that which has dictated the common Trades Union rule that a good workman is not to be allowed to take any advantage of his clumsier neighbour by doing more work within the same time. The literary men, however, of any movement are usually more thoroughgoing than the silent members who are less accustomed to generalise; and this proposal to forbid all inheritance does not yet receive unanimous support. At the Congress of Bâle it was carried by a large majority of those who voted; but a considerable number abstained from voting. M. Eccarius, one of the gentlemen with a foreign name who represented England, advanced Mr. Lowe's proposal of an increased succession duty as a kind of middle term. But the suggestion met with little favour, and was rejected by a large majority. The proposal, however, to abolish inheritances is very dear to the hearts of the leading men. It seems to them to be the most feasible way of attaining their object, the prevention of individual accumulation. Even to their fevered brains the chance of wresting from every individual all that he

*Address of the General Council,' p. 20.

† Ap. Testut, p. 11.

has