SOCIALISM-SLUMPED AND REVISED.

Otago Witness, Issue 2928, 27 April 1910, Page 38

SOCIALISM-SLUMPED AND REVISED.

Socialism is more or less literally in everyone's mouth". The taste is sweet or unpalatable according to the method of preparation. Served up by the demagogue, Socialism outrages the national and family ideals of a British people. Served up" by the utopian idealist it is the millennium, promising a system perfect and infallible. In plain fact, Socialism is neither of these things. " Britannicus," a nom de plume with a Review reputation, treats Socialism in two aspects in an article '' England and Socialism " (North American Review). The slump in the popularity of Socialism and the revolutionary revision in its propaganda are those two aspects. He admits that there is a large, active, enthusiastic, and increasingly successful agitation devoted to Socialist aims. But—- " there is now no Socialist scare." A. year ago Great Britain was in quite a hubbub over Socialism. The ancient formulte and catchwords, " long chewed to death" on the Continent, weTe doing duty in England. Then followed panic, which took various acute and sometimes very humorous forms. Socialism was the menace of an hour. But things have cooled down considerably. "It is easier now to estimate with some approach to rationality the chances of Socialism succeeding in such a country as England." " Britannicus " concludes that all the chances are against success. The obstacles are many and great. England possesses a dozen safeguards that are non-existent on the Continent. The greatest and most permanent is the British national character. It dislikes large views and suspects short cuts—especially in, politics. " Our genius for compromise may be merely another- term for our genius for stupidity, but it is a great and fundamental fact nevertheless, and it has served us well. We are blessed with a stubborn insensibility to ideas They do not fire us, they do not even irritate us—we simply ignore them." England tests all arrangements and institutions by one unvarying formula—Do they work ? And these characteristics have stood to England in the past at the critical moment. We—" we " is England—are '■' too tolerant of abuses," but we have developed phase by phase a political and social system which alone in Europe has stood the test of centuries ■ no mean record. Individualism ,- s weakening in England—it weakens in proportion to the increasing sensitiveness of the State to evils that in" the; past were comfortably ignored. The paternalism bred in the bones of the Latin communities and drilled into the consciousness oi the Germans is absent in England. ' Our instinct is always to cut free from the State instead of Waning on' it." The class consciousness, class hatred, or class spirit means nothing in England, whereas it means everything to Continentals. " The very alphabet of class warfare is a foreign tongue to us." On the Continent, Socialism preceded trades unionism; in England it has tardily followed it. The distinction is vital. The working classes are dead against "the socialisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange." Above all, there will be no revolution in England because the soil is uncongenial. Then " Britannicus " emphasises a truth very obvious to the student of passing events. Socialism is being revolutionised, and the last people tc recognise the fact are Socialists. Socialism " begins as a movement of revolution," and " ends as nothing more than a movement of advanced reform." To emphasise the contention Germany is cited. The Socialists have adopted the parliamentary system. The " single cataclysmic stroke " and the armed revolution are overboard. The Socialist war on religion has ceased. The mistakes of Marx arc readily admitted. The swallowing up of the little farm by the " big farm " is no longer believed. Even the theory of cosmopolitanism is abandoned.

The last word of " Britannicus " is prophetic and emphatic. " There is to-day an awakening consciousness that the future of Socialism depends on its acceptance of. the id-ea and the responsibilities of nationality. What, in short, one observes in Germany, and indeed all over the Continent, is that the Socialists ot to-day, instead of preaching upheaval and dispossession by force, are steadily con-

centrating upon - the r immediate work of material and moral betterment. , In their heart of hearts they have accepted the proposition that a capitalist society will indefinitely continue, and have framed their programmes accordingly. Even, therefore, in countries where it finds a congenial soil for its propaganda, modern Socialism is far more Radical than Revolutionary. . . . The soil of England is not congenial. England, on the contrary, is amply and uniquely barricaded against the onset of Socialism in any of its confiscatory guises."