Signs of Impending Revolution.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 915, 13 September 1889, Page 9

Signs of Impending Revolution.

New York'For "(M. We are now, it can hardly be questioned, in the presence of those new elements, ideas, and tendencies out of which a wider revolution is destined to issue, carrying on political changes to their adequate social consequences. Its outbreak may be more or less delayed. Its advent, however, does not seem capable of hindrance by any powers at the command of the existing rdgime. The change I have iD view may be nob inaccurately described in a sioglo sentence, as an economic revolution, having for its purpose the redistribution of wealth on a reasonable basis. Wa all remember famous question j ‘ What is the Third Estate ?’ and his no less famous answer. * The Third Estate,’ he replied, ‘ i& nothing ; but it ought to be everything.’ In the same spirit, a large consideration of the nineteenth century would impel us to ask, ‘What is the proletariat?’ And the reply might be in very similar terms, ‘ The proletariat is nothing ; but in tho future it will be everything.’ But before we inquire into the right—or wrong —of the immense movement which is now beginning in so many parts of the world and is sweeping into its march the uncivilised tribes of Asia no less than the ‘ residuum ’ or home barbarians of European and American cities from Nijni Novgorod to San Francisco, it is indispensable to get some idea of what is meant by an ‘ economic revolution,’ and a ‘ proletariat.’ The thing to be transformed has been named ‘capitalism.’ It is founded on ‘in. dividualism,’ or the settlement of a country by the allotment of its natural resources as the absolute private property of a few individuals. Take notice, reader, that I, for one, am not going to deny, or even to discuss, the abstract right of individuals to hold private property. The remarks I shall make will always have in view the existing, concrete Bystem of capitalism, which in its present shape is not much more than a century old,

aud goes back to Arkwright’s introduction of the spinning-jenny in 177G —that Dotable year -as to its hejira or diviuo epoch of creation. If anyone maintains that this particular form of social economy is tho true, final, and only rational order of things, with that man lam willing to quarrel. But the words ‘capitalism,’ ‘industrialism,’ ‘bourgeois economy,’ and tho like, shall be here taken to mean the system wo have before our eyes. Lst us look at it, then, for a moment.

Costly as their education has bi=-eD, notone man or woman in a hundred of the leisured classes has acquired, or seems likely to acquire, an insight into tho conditions on which society is now held together. The men, perhaps, study politics, for they may belong by tradition to a party ; and to politics some add what it is the fashion to call history —for the most part a magnified view of the same party-interests. As for women, no one has ever instructed them that it is their duty to ' see life steadily, and see it whole ;’ to science they are strangers, and their religion is made up of a few moial maxims, the commandment to bo respectable, some reminiscences of the Bible, and a regard for their favourite preacher. But neither men nor women care for political economy. Some young men, cramming it in their university course, have found it du l reading ; and most have heard of it from Carlyle as the ‘ dismal science.’ What the average man does understand is making, money. His aim is by some lucky stroke to become a silver, king, railway or cattle-king ; master of a syndicate, or creator of a 1 corner.’ As for his wife, she is to spend, to dresa. to travel on both sides of the Atlantic, and to be the advertisement of her husband’s millions. For him the religion of money ; for her the religion of luxury. And these two combined are to be the equivalent of all the multitudinous facts, aspirations, and principles which make up human life. *He for God only, Bhe for God in him.’ But the god happens to be Mammon.

This it is that justifies Von Hartmann’s description of the nineteenth century as ‘ the most irreligious that has ever be6n seen •’ this, and not the assault upon dogma or the decline of the churches. flhere is a depth below atheism, below anti-religion, and into it the age has fallen. It is the callous indifference to every instinct which does not make for wealth. Observe, we do not live in a time of delicate epicureanism, such as was the Renaissance. To enjoy is not the aim of the individual man, but only to acquire the means of enjoyment. In grasping after those means the end has been forgotten. As manufacturers, under the modern system, produce their goods not for consumption but for sale, and are consequently never content, but always on the lookout for freßh markets, irrespective of how or by whom their goods are consumed, so in like fashion the .dealer in money ceases to look beyond his commodity, and is intent on getting more and more of it until he dies. He has no philosophy of its use or distribution except the theory of exchanges; he speculates, grows rich, builds himself a mausoleum sere perenhius, and is at last put into his gorgeous velvet-lined and silvermounted coffin—designed under his own eyes and costing some five thousand dollars —without having once asked himself what his life was all about. Was its end and purpose the maddening excitement, or the cold fit of money-grubbing, which was all its existence ? Was there no meaning in art, literature, social intercourse, political rights, scientific discoveries, nay, in any religion, Christian or heathen, except to justify, to advertise, and to consecrate capitalism ? Is that the end-all and the beall of the human world, to whose beauty and perfection so many have contributed the best they had, and in whose making poets and philosophers and prophets, the heroes of less mercantile ages, have taken a share ? Have all these things come to pass that the keeper of a whisky-shop in California may grow rich on the spoils of drunken miners, and great financiers dictate peace and war to venerable European monarchies ? The most degraded superstition that ever called itself religisn has not preached such a dogma as this. It falls below fetishism. The worship of the almighty dollar, incarnate in the selfmade capitalist, is a deification ac which Vespasian himself, with his ‘Ut puto, deus fio,’ would stare and gasp. It is the basest idolatry yet exhibited to the wandering gaze of mankind. And like all other idolatries it is man-devouring. It creates a proletariat that it may eat up the lives and souls of men and women by the hundred thousand, by the million, by the generation. Marnmcn has the gaping mouth and the fiery hands of Moloch. Into that portentous inaw the young, the innocent, the broken-hearted with fruitless toil, the lonely and helpless, all those who have only their labour to sell, are flung from year to year; and it is not nor can I e filled up. To prove these things in detail would be easy but infinite; briefly to sum them, as I have done, is to lay oneself open to the charge of exaggeration. But the stern facts are written (and the worst of them not written) in the history of labour during tho past hundred years. For what is eloquently described as ‘ the progress of civilisation,’ as ‘material prosperity,' and ‘unexampled wealth,’ or more modestly as ‘the rise of the industrial middle class,’ becomes, when we look into it with eyes purged from economic delusions, the creation of a ‘lower and lowest ’ class, without land of their own, without homes, tools, or property beyond the strength of their hands, whose lot is more helplessly wretched than any poet of the Inferno has yet imagined. Sunk in bhe mire of ignoranoe, want, and immorality, they seem to have for their only, gospel the emphatic words attributed to Mr Ruskin : ‘lf there is a next world, they will be damned ; and if there is none, they are damned already.’