thought that he is serving humanity: for the triumph of his nation will bring to the other nation wider liberty and more and better Socialism than his unfortunate alien comrade has ever known before.

When a movement is in a state of confusion, obscured and torn by the madness of the larger world that surrounds it, one does not expect it to give expression to its clearest and best ideas. Yet it is just when a movement is caught unawares, shaken, and driven to action stripped of non-essentials, that we can best estimate its strength and weakness. The war will have a profound influence on Socialism; it may even revolutionize the revolutionists. Socialism may have some influence on the immediate course of the nations after peace is reëstablished, and it will certainly influence their course in a more or less distant future. What Socialist ideas promise to emerge integral from this conflict? What other conflicts do they lead to? What did the political candidate mean by asserting that a vote for Socialism is a vote against war? What is meant by international Socialism? Does capitalism cause war? If Socialists are against war, what do they mean by the class war? Are they mere humanitarian pacifists with an after

noon-tea ideal of society? Where did they get their ideas? What, in particular, do they amount to in America and what are they likely to amount to? To answer these questions let us take a look at them as they were or seemed to be before the war.

CHAPTER II

THE ORIGIN OF SOCIALISM

SOCIALISM has its origin in the revolt of the working classes against the exploiting classes. That revolt is a fact, not a theory, and the measure of the extent and intensity of that fact is the measure of the extent and intensity of the Socialist force. The living force was begotten by the practical needs of multitudes of people; it does not owe its existence to economists, philosophers, prophets. Philosophers, economists, prophets, poets, exhorters, have been its school teachers and biographers; they have given it method of thought and manner of speech; they have put into communicable literary form the aspirations of its obscure will, armed it with argument, and helped it to selfconscious organization. The recorders of its life have not been uniformly concurrent in their testimony; the schoolmasters have been of many minds and have fought each other with every weapon known to human controversy.

The resultant multiplicity of ideas has been an excellent thing for the movement, for it has given to Socialism an unlimited variety of interpretations and tactics to choose from and test; it has made alliances between one or another aspect of Socialist thought and almost every science, every art, every branch of human activity; and it has ensured the freedom of Socialism as a whole from subservience to any one thinker. From the multitude of ideas embodied in Socialist history, literature, and practical tactics, emerge only two or three that are essential. The most important idea is the Class Struggle.

Throughout history economic classes have fought with each other by force of arms and force of mind for mastery of the world or share in the mastery of the world. All the wars of history are of two kinds: (a) contests between members of the same class and their followers, between duke and duke, king and king, state and state, government and government; and (b) contests between classes within the same state, territory, or jurisdiction. The second type of war is known as a revolution if the revolting class succeeds; it is a "rebellion" if the revolting class fails. Revolution may be implicated in wars of the first type, may cause

them or grow out of them. But revolution always has a special object, the oversetting of one economic class by another. The triumphant class may be apparently larger or smaller than the vanquished. When imperial Rome succeeded republican Rome there was a shift of power from a more numerous to a less numerous master class. When the barons beat King John into subjection there was a shift of power from a less numerous to a more numerous master class. The Cromwellian war was the attempt of the country squire and farmer to wrest power from the aristocratic landlord and his allies, the city merchant and the monarchy. Its immediate result was the substitution of a new dynasty for the old. Its revolutionary result was realized later, in 1689, when with the Declaration of Rights the modern Parliament, representing all the owning and business classes, was more or less definitely established.

The French Revolution is a bewildering tangle of interstate and interclass conflicts. The middle class (the Third Estate) forced the king, the clergy, and the nobility to yield some of their privileges and set up an insecure republicanism. In this they were helped by the peasants and the mob. (In history, including the contem