A EUROPEAN REVOLUTION PREDICTED.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XX, Issue XVIII, 30 April 1898, Page 533

A EUROPEAN REVOLUTION PREDICTED.

PRINCE KROPOTKIN ON THE GROWTH OF SOCIALISM. Prince Kropotkin, the anarchistaristocrat and scientist-revolutionary, in surveying the socialistic movement in Europe, and especially in England, finds much encouragement for himself and his party. The signs of the times, as he reads them, in France am! Germany are portentous of impending revolutions. Socialism, he says —- taking the word in its widest sense—becomes every year a more and more powerful factor in the life of Europe. I left England at the end of 1882, went to France, where I was arrested and imprisoned, and did not return to London before March. 1886. All had totally changed in the meantime. Socialism was on all lips. All over England, in all classes and ranks of society, an intense interest in socialism had lieen suddenly awakened, and where I travelled in England and

Scotia ml, lecturing in many places, and stayed in many towns as the guest to-day in a rich mansion and to-morrow in a poor cottage. 1 saw interest in socialism equally awake in the mansion as in the cottage. Till late at night, after my lecture, I was asked to explain the socialist and anarchist position, and in the rich mansions I found almost as much eagerness to penetrate into the essence of our ideas as in the poor cottages. In these conversations I understood for the first time why popular movements which invariably ended in France in a wholesale extermination of the workers had taken in England a peaceful development. The wealthier classes made concessions at the right tune. Since 18S5 the socialist ideas have steadily developed in Great Britain. This or that special organisation may have decreased in numbers; the existing organisations may have fewer persons coming to their meetings than they hail twelve years ago. but the spirit of socialism, under its various and varying aspects, has been steadily developing. That the working classes all over Europe, ami especially in France, are alive to the movement, I hardly need to say. The great mass of the French workers have no faith in any of the political parties— not even in the Radicals. They see the disintegration, the decay of present institutions, and. as one of the French writers has put it. they wait for their inheritance. They wait for the moment when some new start will become possible. As to Germany. 1 am very much inclined to believe that it stands on the eve of a Republican revolution very similar to the revolution of 1818 in France, during which revolution attempts will be made in a socialistic direction very much on the lines of State socialism. I pass under silence Italy and Spain, where the present Monarchies are never sure of their existence for another twelve month, and Austria, where the national problems are in a terrible confusion, entangled as they are with economical ones. In all these countries socialism is making rapid strides.