LECKY'S HISTORY OF SOCIALISM.

To many the most interesting chapters in Mr. LECKY'S new volumes will be those in which the author gives, in his own pleasant and engrossing style, a history of the modern movement known as Socialism. To some Socialism is a rainbow in the sky. To others it looks as the storm-cloud threatening Europe, endangering the prospects of the civilised world far more than did the ever memorable political outbreak of the last century—the outbreak which we describe as the French Revolution. Of the rapid spread of the Socialistic doctrine there is no doubt whatever, nearly every Legislature in Europe now having its Socialistic group. In Mr. LECKY'S volumes Germany, France, Great Britain, and America are dealt with in turn, and it would be difficult to name a work in which more historical information is brought together in a bright and popular form. What is the Socialism of which we hear so much and of which many have so vague an idea ? Those who wish an answer may well seek those pages. A perusal of the work by those who would grasp the views of the most intellectual and thoughtful of our modern historians is the more necessary, as nowhere does Mr. LECKY attempt to sum up his studies in a sentence. His nearest approach to crystallisation is when he says of the Socialistic theories of the day that "they are by no means new. Few things are more curious to observe in the radical speculation of our times than the revival of beliefs which were supposed to have been long since finally exploded—the aspirations to systems belonging to early and rudimentary stages of society."

The German Socialists are probably the greatest force in the movement. They have supplied the thought, as the French have the "go," of the crusade. And the two great German names are LASSALLE and MARX. LASSALLE did most of the work of the pioneer. His first essay was a vehement attack upon SCHULZE-DELITZSCH, who was labouring hard to establish co-operative societies and other profit-sharing enterprises, and everywhere was preaching the doctrine of self-help. LASSALLE declared that SCHULZE was the mere tool of the capitalists, who were cunningly planting outposts in the ranks of the masses. He assailed SCHULZT with a torrent of scurrilous banter and invective, and succeeded in displacing him from his position. To the doctrine of self-help the German Socialists have been from first to last steadily opposed, and here we have the divergent principles of the two schools. The liberal or Conservative school, as it is now sometimes called, would elevate and improve the man. The Socialists, disregarding the unit, would reconstitute society. LASSALLE urged the working classes to throw aside the self help process as not only slow and painful, but also as essentially improper—as tending to reinforce the great capitalists with a number of smaller capitalists who would be strenuous allies. The true and direct road is, he urged, for labour to obtain political ascendancy, and to use political power to seize upon the wealth and production of the world. Wages, he insisted, always tend to the minimum or starvation level, and if a workman so saves as to obtain an income of 1s. per day his earnings will be lessened by competition by that amount. Profit, he says, is the plunder of the worker by the capitalist, and it ever tends to increase. Machinery aggravates the evil by placing the worker more and more in the grasp of the exploiters. "The back of the labourer is the green table on which undertakers and speculators play the game of fortune." In thorough sympathy with certain politicians who are contesting seats in Victoria to-day, LASSALLE contended that by a heavy graduated tax on land values all rents should be diverted from the owners to the state.

KARL MARX was a fellow-worker, though on some points the men differed. MARX demanded that members of Parliament should be paid; that mines should become public property ; that the state should appropriate all railways, canals, and steamships; that the state should establish workshops, and should guarantee all workmen an existence ; and the tax on land values is, of course, an indispensable item. Further, the followers of MARX denounce the existing system of marriage and of the family as fostering individualistic greed.

The final programme of the followers of LASSALE and of MARX, the one which the German Socialists are now advocating, declares that "the emancipation of labour can only be effected by the labouring class, all others being reactionary," The party of labour undertakes to break the brazen "law of wages," and to " put an end " to all social inequality, to impose taxes on land values and otherwise to exterminate private ownership , and to carry out those views it demands an equal franchise for all citizens above the age of 20 and the direct vote or referendum. The "one man one vote" and the referendum belong to " Socialism," to use one of LASSALLE'S expressions, "as the handle to the axe."

Of the big volume in which MARX enshrined his ideas, Mr LECKY says that it is not probable that a work so long, so obscure, so tortuous in its meanings, and so unspeakably dreary in its style has had many readers, but a certain effect was obtained "by the mere publication of a highly pretentious treatise, with a great parade of learning, expressing the most arrogant contempt for the most illustrious economical and historical writers of the century " How familiar is the Victorian public with the tactics thus described ! The more stupid, narrow, and small the man, the more is he inclined to speak with scorn of great thinkers as half rogues and half simpletons, and to imagine that this abuse invests himself with consequence.

The Lassalle and Marx doctrines lie at the root of all Socialism, and, as Mr LECKY says, they are conspicuously untrue. Workmen's wages are increasing all through Europe and also workmen's savings. If the profit of the employer is simply plunder, the peasant proprietor and the artisan who works on his own account ought to make great gains. Notoriously they do not. In no country has the individualistic or self help principle been more applied than in Great Britain, and instead of the working man being there the degraded and debased victim of the capitalist, nowhere in the world has labour made greater strides. Contrasting the position of the workman to day with the position 50 years back Sir ROBERT GIFFEN says that the British workman gets from 50 to 100 per cent. more money for 20 per cent. less work, while the purchasing power of his wages is greater than before. Could we expect to pluck out of the ruin and revolution which Socialism would involve any triumph so hopeful as this and so gratifying to humanity?

 The Argus 20 May 1896,