political and economic status of the workers in three such leading countries as England, the United States and Germany.

THE MOST RECENT PHASE OF THE STRUGGLE OF LABOR AGAINST CAPITAL

I have already called attention to the formation of trade-unions in England in the early part of the nineteenth century. After they had won legal recognition and were no longer persecuted they gave their chief attention to effecting wage-agreements with their employers and to putting through legislation reducing the hours of labor, protecting the women and children, introducing safety devices and so forth-a mass of often infinitesimal, but in their bulk, very appreciable, ameliorations in the lot of the wage-earner, servant and slave of the machine. In England the course of labor has continued down to our own day to travel this slow upward path characterized by concessions and compromise, though of late years the continued fair-weather prospect has been troubled by the more radical agitation imported from the continent. To this I shall now invite the reader's attention. I have already spoken of St. Simon and Louis Blanc and the rise of a socialist doctrine in France. Its gist was the abolition of private property and the nationalization of the means of production and although it did not call itself socialism at first, the name of socialism became attached to it and has remained attached to all similar philosophies to the present day.

The socialism which was destined to gather the greatest number under its banner was born in Germany toward the middle of the nineteenth century and found its first

utterance in the socalled Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The decisive point about that proclamation (1848) was that it declared the capitalist system had superseded the older feudal system by virtue of a necessary historical process and that the capitalist system would in its turn be superseded by the socialist system by virtue of the same ineluctable force. The appeal to history gave to the new propaganda a cold, scientific character and served to establish the conviction that it was the part of reason to work for the success of Socialism since in doing so one merely took one's stand with Nature and Nature's sacred instrument, the law of Evolution. Of course the Communist Manifesto endorsed all the political rights for which the middle class had been contending and which they had by no means as yet entirely achieved-universal suffrage, religious toleration, freedom of the press and of association—but it insisted that the proletariat would by reason of their numbers soon swamp the bourgeoisie and that then an economic revolution would be carried through, by law and not by violence, which would distribute the total harvest of labor in equal shares among all those engaged in the various processes of production. These German founders insisted also from the first that the movement concerned the workers not in their country merely but the world over, and that it must consequently take on an international character. When therefore, after a period of incubation, a Marxist party, calling itself officially the Social-democratic party of Germany, was formed (1875), it was presently supplemented by Social-democratic parties established in every other country of Europe;

and all of them got into touch with one another by means of periodic international congresses and a permanent executive bureau located at Brussels. The hope of some enthusiasts that the international organization would prove itself strong enough to dominate the various national governments has shown itself repeatedly to be a delusion and never more completely so that in the great war-crisis of the summer of 1914 when Internationalism fell over like a house of cards; but the various national organizations have nonetheless vigorously projected themselves into politics, especially during the last quarter of a century, and have confidently asserted that their assumption of the bourgeois heritage and of the governments of the world is not far distant.

In turning now to examine the present economic status of the working masses in certain leading countries, I would guard against misunderstanding. It is my beliefand I shall give expression to it-that the improvements, limited though they be, which characterize the present situation, represent the hard-won triumphs of the workingmen themselves and must in a measure at least be ascribed to the Social-democratic propaganda since the socialdemocratic party has been the stoutest and most consistent champion of the cause of labor. But I am of course quite ready to admit that a large number of other agents have contributed to the result. Many workmen, for instance, although remaining totally indifferent to the social philosophy of Marx and Engels, have nevertheless not failed in eager agitation for ameliorative laws, and many middle class groups, especially the intellectual leaders, have been tirelessly active to eliminate evils and to build up a suf

ferable and human atmosphere around the factory. Civilized society, as the socialists aver, may be an affair of rival classes and the history of civilization a perpetual struggle among them, but a given national group is also a homogeneous sum of many social integers and an improvement in the position of one class as soon as made is likely to be woven into the general national consciousness. This is worth emphasizing in order that we do not fall into the error of making so much of class strife and class divisions that we forget the remarkable cohesion of states and nations secured by a common language, institutions, manners, and ideas.

THE PRESENT SITUATION IN THE UNITED STATES.

Our own country represents in many respects a special case and the evolutionary formula of Europe is not applicable to it. The reason lies in the particular economic situation in the United States. We have here a land of vast area, magnificant resources, and sparse population. We began our life as a full-fledged democracy, not as foolish flatterers would have us think because of the inherently noble disposition of our ancestors, but because of the favorable ratio between population and free land. Our young democracy of 1776 and of the following generations demanded only freedom, that is, the right for each individual to appropriate as much of the unclaimed wilderness as his hands could tame to his use. This produced the pioneer spirit, the greatest moral asset in our history. American democracy was not in the least concerned with equality in any economic sense, although a sort of rough equality was for a long time secured by

the mere fact that the unclaimed lands were endless and were guaranteed by the government in limited, fixed quantity to any one who chose to acquire a title by settling on them. Until 1850 we were substantially a democracy of farmers cultivating a healthy out-of-doors individualism and blessed with an approximate equality of possessions and income.

About 1850 the Industrial Revolution struck us, starting in the east and north and moving gradually west. For the next few decades the glorious American pioneer spirit celebrated greater triumphs than ever before in appropriating coal and iron deposits, building mills and factories, crisscrossing the land with railroads, and in importing a proletariat of wage-earners from the overcrowded countries of Europe. Of course, following an irresistible law, the political control passed into the hands of the new capitalist or middle class, but such considerable numbers shared in the returns and the wages paid the workers remained so ample that the country, fairly wallowing in prosperity, was for a long time absolutely blind to its transformation. The political guarantees of the ballot, free speech, and free association were-except in sporadic instances not withdrawn and helped maintain the illusion that the government was by and for the people. Not till the end of the century did the truth begin to dawn upon the public. The country was visibly run by bosses who were known to be corrupt and who, in spite of protest, could not be shaken off. Why? An even superficial investigation sufficed to show that these bosses were only the agents of the capitalists who preferred not to appear but who were set on managing the