THE MATERIALIST IDEA.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 24, 30 January 1911, Page 3

THE MATERIALIST IDEA.

A READING OF HISTORY. Mr. Peter Bowling delivered an address at His Majesty's Theatre last evening on "The Materialist Conception of History." Mr. W. Taylor presided over a fair' attendance. The motif of Mr. Bowling's reading of history was that progress from the first was due to the gradual change and improvement in the tools of production. Thus he stepped from primitive man, when prisoners were eaten, to the present day, when the prisoners were "eaten" in another way. In the "slave" period of the world's history the slave was treated differently as a tool of production. The condition of the workers was better in the period of serfdom in England than m the present age of industrial capitalism. Slavery was only abolished when the improvement in methods of production made it, in the-opinion of the masters, no longer necessary to keep them in comfort and leisure. The Socialist now contended that not only was chattel slavery unnecessary, but that the whole present system of wage slavery was not required. The means of production had so improved that the enslavement of man was not necessary at all, simply because the forces of nature had been enslaved by man to his own ends. The only reason why men were not making the progress they ought to make was' that they did not understand the economic conditions uncter which they were working. Why were not the workers free? Because the whole machinery of production had been stolen from them by centuries of legislation in the interests of a few. Tho workers were now held in a condition worse than that of chattel slavery. What men wanted to do was to make their voices clearly heard. If they only berame class-conscious for a few minutes there would be a rare nutter in the capitalistic dovecote. The only remedy for the existing state of things was the development of Socialism.