SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1263, 14 May 1896, Page 40

SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND.

Herr Liobknccht, tho Socialist member of tho Gorman Parliament for one of tho six divisions of Berlin, live of which wore carried at the last election by Socialists, wdll coino to England about the middle of May on a throe weeks' lecturing tour. All tho arrangements for tho tour arc in tho hands of tho Zurich Committee, who, with the Parliamentary Committee of tho Trade Union Congress, are also making tho arrangements for the forthcoming International Socialist and Trade Union Congress, to bo held in London at the end of July this year. The committee have hud a very large number of applications all over England and Scotland for tho services of Liobknccht, so many applications, in fact, flint it has been found quite impossible to accede to them all ; but the committee are at present arranging for Liobkuoehl to address meetings in the following towns: London, Southampton, Bristol, Oxford, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bradford and Manchester. Wilhelm Liobknccht speaks very good English, and the fact that ho, a man ovc]' seventy years of ago, will go back from his lecturing tour to prison for four months for having "insulted the Gorman Emperor," will certainly not diminish the interest of his visit to England. A writer in tho February number cf .Maei.uill,ui's .Magazine upon the political position in Germany says:—"What is

called State Socialism, which is but Socialism pure and simple under the guiso of a less distasteful name, seems to bo in Germany an almost universally accepted idea. Tiie Gorman will endure —ho, rather, will invito —an amount of interference from the Sta.to which fe-.v Englishmen would tolerate. Almost, everywhere tho State has reached its hand ; the bureaucracy, or the men

with, the pen-; in their hands, as Mirubeau described them, lie like a dead weight up.,n individual freedom. There was much truth as well as humour in Heine's jest that an Englishman loves liberty as his lawful wife, a Frenchman loves it as his mistress, but that a German loves it as his old grandmother. And so it is that for many years past the tendency of Gorman legislation has been in tho direction of enlarging the sphere of the interference of the State."