KARL MARX: Poverty, hatred shaped life of a great revolutionary.

 Does the spread of Communism menace world security? Is it a sane political doctrine, or a new form of Fascism? This study of Communist No. 1, Karl Marx, helps to answer these questions.

THIS week, Mr. Churchill told the British House of Commons: "It is in the Kremlin, if anywhere, that the seeds of a new World war are being sown."

 What are Russia's plans?

 How is the original doctrine of Communism, as defined by the intellectual father of the Soviet regime, Dr. Karl Marx, likely to affect our future?

 The world would like to know.

 Marx, the most influential political economist of the past century (if not of all time) died in London 63 years ago.

 Today he is a sort of demigod to Communists throughout the world; to them his doctrines, as interpreted by Lenin and currently by Stalin, are an official gospel with the force of a religion.

 To others, including some non-Marxian socialists as well as many believers in individual freedom, Marx is one of history's most wicked men, a brilliant but depraved apostle of hate whose doctrines would destroy most of the values of Western civilisation.

 Some people believe that the Russian Revolution and Soviet international policy are the living embodiments of Marx's doctrines. Others regard them as a complete negation of his doctrines.

 The truth lies somewhere between.

 But, however narrowly limited is the possibility of understanding current Soviet manoeuvres through Marxian texts, a study of Marx helps to illuminate some basic attributes of Soviet thought and behavior that have puzzled Western observers.

 Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, a Rhineland city near the French border, the son of a well-to-do lawyer and a descendant rabbis on both sides.

 Heinrich hoped that his son would follow in his respectable footsteps. He was overjoyed when at 18 Karl became engaged to the 22-year-old girl next door, Jenny von Westphalen, beautiful daughter of a baron.

 Although Heinrich died when his son was only 20, he had already foreseen disappointment.

 After Karl had gone to the university (first at Bonn, where he soon got in trouble for radical activities and "nocturnal drunkenness and riot," then at Berlin), the paternal letters were filled with foreboding and reproach; for the boy's egoism, for his neglect of his parents, for his extravagance and "wild frolics," for the "demon" that seemed possess him, for fear that his heart was not as great as his mind, for the "dangerous and uncertain future" he was preparing for Jenny.

 Despite occasional "frolics," Marx was already displaying a prodigious intellectual energy.

 In one of his infrequent letters to his father, he reported that during the past term, in addition to reading an astonishing variety of books and writing summaries and reflections on them, he had written three volumes of poems to Jenny, translated the "Germania" of Tacitus and the "Elegies" of Ovid, plus two volumes of the "Pandects" (Roman civil law), written a play and an original philosophy of law that he tore up as worthless, and, "while out of sorts," got to know Hegel "from beginning to end." 

Hegel, who had died only a few years before, was to remain a major influence on Marx's thinking.

 The first of Marx's political articles that got him into trouble was written early in 1842. It was a blast at the Prussian censorship.

 Soon the young rebel began writing for Cologne's liberal Rheinische Zeitung. In October he became its editor-in-chief.

 A few months later the paper was suppressed because it had criticised the Russian Czarist regime.

 Marx, after a seven-year engagement, married Jenny and went off to Paris to study socialism.

 In Paris he swiftly developed from rebellious youth to full-fledged revolutionary, resolved to destroy existing society and bring about a "complete rebirth of mankind." 

In Paris, too, began the great friendship and collaboration of Marx's life. Friedrich Engels, two years younger, was also a Rhinelander, the son of a prosperous textile manufacturer with mills in Prussia's Barmen and in England's Manchester.

 Friedrich Engels' revolutionary zeal had been spurred by the degradation of Barmen's industrial workers and by the harsh bigotry of his grimly Calvinistic father. 

Outwardly Marx and Engels were almost complete opposites.

 Marx was short, stocky, powerful-chested, with a swarthy skin and shaggy mane and beard of coal-black hair. Engels was tall, slender, blue-eyed, fair-haired.

 Marx was grim, brooding, academic, awkward, unconventional. Engels was gay, gregarious, a devotee of fencing, fox-hunting, and other sports, a lover of wine and music.

 But when Engels stopped in Paris to pay a call on Marx in 1844, the two found their ideas and sympathies so closely matched and mutually so stimulating that they talked steadily for 10 days. Thereafter, whether they wrote jointly or discussed and encouraged each other's individual efforts, their lives and work were indissolubly joined. 

Marx was no mere armchair revolutionist.

 In Brussels, after being expelled from Paris, he and Engels joined the League of the Just (soon renamed the Communist League and transformed from a hole-and-corner conspiracy into a propaganda society with unconcealed revolutionary aims) and set about fanning, by means of writing and speeches, the fires of revolt that were to sweep Europe in 1848.

 In 1847, in the "Communist Manifesto," they produced one of the most forceful pieces of propaganda ever written. 

The next year, after the beginning of the revolts and Marx's expulsion from Brussels (in the course of which Jenny, jailed over night, was forced to share a cell with a prostitute), they hurried to Cologne to publish a revolutionary newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

 Engels even fired some rifle shots against the Prussian Army when it invaded the Palatinate. The revolution failed.

 Marx brought out the last number of his paper in red ink; it sold 20,000 copies. 

Years later, in 1864, after the Communist League had broken up, the two friends helped found the International Workingmen's Association — the first International. 

One of his sons-in-law compared Marx's mind to a warship with steam up, always ready to move in any direction on the sea of thought.

 He won arguments — but never any large personal following. He was handicapped not only by his metallic voice and general lack of stage magnetism, but more seriously by his passion to dominate, his fierce intolerance of any ideas or leadership except his own.

 Sooner or later he quarrelled with nearly all of his fellow socialists and other radicals. The failure of the 1848 revolution and the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, into which he had poured all that he could raise on his and Jenny's inheritances, left Marx penniless.

 Banished from Germany, he abandoned his Prussian citizenship. Now, for the rest of his life, he was a man without a country.

 After a short time in Paris and one last expulsion, he went to London to stay. There, determined to follow his goal "through thick and thin," he resolutely refused to let "bourgeois society turn me into a money-making machine."

 Marx was not entirely "practical" in his private affairs; there was about him something of the absent-minded scholar (he had once hoped to become a professor). 

Only once during his 33-year exile in England did Marx grow desperate enough to try to get a regular job: then a railway company turned him down because of poor hand writing.

 Always Marx plodded ahead on his masterpiece, "Capital," reading enormously in many languages and piling up mountains of notes. He worked mostly in the British Museum, daily from ten to seven, and then at home far into the night.

 When Marx in 1867 published the book "to which I have sacrificed my health, my happiness, and my family," he firmly but quite wrongly hoped that he would soon be a "made man."

 In London, the Marx family's situation shortly grew so desperate that Engels felt compelled to go back to "filthy trade" in his father's Manchester mill in order to support them all. But the sums he was able to send from time to time were not enough to do more than keep the Marxes alive.

 After eviction from their first London home, the Marxes (with a German maid who stayed with them to the end) moved to a two-room tenement in the slums of Soho.

Sometimes Marx lacked money for writing paper or for postage. Sometimes, beset by dunning or distrustful tradesmen, the family lived for days on bread and potatoes. 

The evidence is surprisingly unanimous that under these circumstances Marx remained as devoted to his family as he was truculent in his relations with the bourgeoisie and rival revolutionists. A police agent, for example, regarded him as "the gentlest and mildest of men" in the home circle.

 Marx was plagued by ill-health during most of the last half of his life. He was tortured by chronic insomnia, inflammation of the eyes, racking headaches, rheumatism.

 THE great riddle of Karl Marx's personality will probably always be in dispute: how much was he driven to his extraordinary life and work by love of humanity, how much by hatred of capitalist society and of its more fortunate members?

 Certainly he kept himself personally remote from the proletariat he championed. 

The vivid accounts of English working-class miseries in the mid-19th century that help make "Capital" so heart-searing a document were drawn, not from personal observation, but in the main from Engels' "Condition of the English Working Class," and from reports of parliamentary investigations Marx read in the British Museum. 

"Working for the world" was one of Marx's favorite sayings, and occasionally he mentioned the service or the sufferings of humanity in his writings. But for every word of such explicit humanitarianism there are a thousand of hatred and appeals to hatred.

 He spoke the word "bourgeois" as though spitting out something evil-tasting.

 He asserted that the power of love had failed to better social conditions in the 1800 years since Christ, and that the "iron necessity" that drives the proletariat to destroy capitalism and capitalists "will open the way to socialist reforms by transformation of existing economic relations sooner than all the love that glows in all the feeling hearts of the world."

 He argued that what the proletariat needed was not Christian "self-abasement, resignation, submission and humility," but "courage, confidence, pride, and independence even more than it needs daily bread."

 Marxism is not to be found neatly packaged in "Capital" — and especially not in the first volume alone, which is all that most people read.

 His theories of history, politics, and revolution are scattered through the writings of 40 years.

 Some of the reasoning is difficult to follow, especially for those not steeped in the grandiose and mystical speculations of German philosophy.

 Sometimes the reasoning in one work contradicts in part, that in another. But Marxs' main conclusions, his fundamental principles, are reasonably clear.

 Marx called his theory "historical materialism." It was the application to history of what Engels called "dialectical materialism."

 From Hegel the team borrowed the notion that everything in the world is in constant flux; something new is always developing, something old is dying away. And sooner or later all this change is for the better.

 Progress is achieved by what Hegel called the dialectic: one force (thesis) is opposed by a second (antithesis), which has split from it, and from their conflict emerges a synthesis containing the best elements of both. 

When the unification is completed, then it gradually becomes old and the process is repeated. 

Hegel, a patriotic State-worshipper, believed that human progress had reached its apex in the Prussian State of Friedrich Wilhelm III.

 Marx held out for one more step.

 "Modern bourgeois society, rising from the ruins of feudal society," proclaimed the "Manifesto," "did not make an end of class antagonisms. It merely set up new classes in place of the old; new conditions of oppression, new embodiments of struggle. Our own age, the bourgeois age, is distinguished by this; that it has simplified class antagonisms. More and more society is splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great and directly contraposed classes: Bourgeois and Proletariat."

In "Capital," Marx set out to show how capitalism (thesis) must inevitably, by its own inner laws, become so increasingly intolerable to the proletariat as to produce revolt against the bourgeoisie (antithesis) and a classless society (synthesis).

 Marx, who scorned other socialists' neat blueprinted Utopias, said little about what the classless society would be like.

 He did not even find it necessary to assume that the revolution would wash away all human vice.

 For him it was enough that:

 ⬤ Most of the world's troubles have sprung from the exploitation of class by class. ⬤ The ascendancy of the working class would abolish classes by making every man a producer.

 ⬤ Abolition of private property in the means of production would mean that no one would have anything to exploit anyone with.

 To be sure, he predicted that after the revolution, while Communism was emerging from the womb of capitalism in a "long and painful travail," there would be a "political transition period" requiring a "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" and considerable inequality of living conditions.

 But after sufficient education and organisation, the no-longer-needed State would "wither away," and everyone would live in peace and plenty in a society devoted to "the full and free development of every individual," under the slogan, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!"

 This vision, the end result of the continuous progress assured by the dialectic, is to almost all Marxists not a hope but a "certainty," for to them, as to Marx, dialectic materialism is not a philosophy but a science, a science of society comparable in exactness with the science of biology.

 Indeed, Marx fancied himself as the Darwin of the social sciences.

 In explaining why capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, Marx begins with the theory, inconclusively advanced by Adam Smith and developed by David Ricardo that labor is the source of all value.

 He went on to develop his theory of surplus value, the keystone of his economic philosophy. According to this view, each worker spent only a fraction of his working hours earning his wages. The rest of the day he works for nothing.

 From this unpaid labor come all profits, providing those needed to pay interest and rent.

 Thus Marx arrived at his picture of society; a host of useless capitalists and landlords robbing the workers of the fruits of their labor.

 Every capitalist, he argued, necessarily likes to wring from his workers as much surplus value as he can; even if he is humane, his competitors force him to exploit. At first he may simply make his employees work longer hours. When the law forbids that, or the capitalist finds that it lessens efficiency, he may shorten the hours, but introduce the speed-up and stretch-out to make his workers work faster and harder. 

What do these things mean for the worker?

 Marx's summation: "They mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital."

 Machinery produces technological unemployment. The capitalist accumulates more and more of the profits of his unpaid labor, he buys more and more machinery, machines do more and more of the work, fewer and fewer human hands are needed to tend them.

 Besides, capitalism needs a large unemployed "industrial reserve army" for the times when it suddenly wants to hurl large amounts of its overflowing wealth into new industries, or into old ones whose markets have suddenly expanded.

 Finally comes the worst of capitalism's evils, the periodic recurrence of ruinous depressions.

Marx, although asserting that capitalism tends to give the working class less and less money to buy its products, flatly rejected the belief of labor leaders and other reformers that everything would be all right if employers would only pay their workers high enough wages to maintain a balance between production and consumption.

 Marx held that the prime cause of depression is overproduction, resulting from expanding capital's insatiable urge to find a profit and the compulsion upon invested capital to keep producing, regardless of demand, in a desperate effort to maintain itself.

 Marx predicted capitalism's trend toward concentration and monopoly. "One capitalist," he observed, "always kills many."

 He predicted the virtual disappearance of the middle class, as one ruined capitalist after another dropped into the proletariat.

 He believed that the end would come when a handful of great capitalists at last con-fronted a proletarian multitude, disciplined and united by enforced association in great industries, driven to despair by prolonged depression.

 By that time, too, capitalism would have reached its highest development, as Marx believed it must; its centralisation and productivity would be at a peak of ripeness for handy plucking by the proletariat.

 To Marx it made no difference whether Capitalists are good or bad: they are driven by forces they neither control nor understand.

 No matter how much the worker's lot may be improved, there can be no final compromise; the class war must be fought to the end. The end must be "a revolutionary change in the whole structure of society," or else "the common ruin of the contending classes." 

Marx taught his followers to harness for their ends the energy of class hatred wherever it existed.

 But he was aware that the conditions for revolution had not arrived. The only hope of a proletarian victory, as he saw it, was through a temporary alliance with the bourgeois democrats then revolting against monarchy and aristocracy.

 In 1850, Marx gave the Communist League significant strategic instructions in handling the bourgeoisie: "In the event of a struggle against a common foe . . the interests of both parties coincide for the moment . . .

 "During the struggle and after the struggle . . the workers must at every opportunity put forth their own demands alongside those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers the moment the democratic citizens set about taking over the government . . . 

"From the first moment of victory our distrust must no longer be directed against the vanquished reactionary party, but against our previous allies, against the party which seeks to exploit the common victory for itself alone " 

The "Manifesto" laid out the goal: "The Communists . . . openly declare that their purpose can be achieved only by the forcible overthrow of the whole existing social order . . . Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all lands, unite!"

 What Marx meant by some of his strategic and tactical statements has been a subject of bitter dispute among his disciples.

 Interestingly enough, Marx did not mention a party in his 1850 address. In the "Manifesto" he wrote that "Communists do not form a separate party conflicting with other working class parties."

 He never spoke of a dictatorship of the party. Of course, just as he believed in the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat as instruments of struggle toward his goal of the classless and stateless society, he believed in a party as an educational agency. 

But he had never seen nor could he have envisioned the kind of monolithic and omnipotent party that rules Russia today. 

As for the "dictatorship" idea, there has long been controversy as to the meaning he attached to this concept.

 But this much is clear: Marx defined freedom as a condition in which the state is subordinate to society, and Engels equated the dictatorship of the proletariat with "the democratic republic."

 What was meant by this seeming semantic outrage?

 Some followers have believed that it meant a political democracy in which the proletariat, grown to immense proportions, could by ballot dictate economic measures, furthering its interests against those of the capitalists. Then the task of the party would be not to rule, but to educate and lead the proletariat.

 Perhaps this sounds like nothing more than New Dealism, rather than violent revolution.

 THE fact is that Marx observed the failure of his frequent prophecies of early revolution and he shifted from the hot intransigency of youth to the involved economic and metaphysical abstractions that make "Capital" such hard going in spots.

 Without ceasing to be a revolutionist, he became more reconciled to waiting and even eschewed the dogma of the universal indispensability of violence, declaring that socialism had a good chance of a peaceful birth where indigenous democratic traditions were as tenaciously rooted as in the Netherlands, England, and the U.S. 

Eventually, struggles inside the First International put before Marx and Engels the unpleasant alternatives of concentrating on its affairs to the neglect of study and writing or of letting dominance pass to the Russian anarchist, Bakunin, an advocate of direct and violent action without reference to political conditions.

 Thereupon Marx and Engels sent the International to the U.S. to die, which it did.

 In 1889, with Engels' blessing and under the leadership of some of Marx's disciples, the Second International was founded. 

The Second International placed its faith in slow accretions of power by the proletariat, which would build a new socialist society inside the shell of the old. 

The socialist task, therefore, was to teach and preach the inevitable coming of a classless society by almost automatic evolution.

 World War I laid the Second International low.

 Another interpretation of Marx was made by V. I. Lenin for use in the country Marx had regarded as the least hopeful prospect for socialist revolution.

 By its use Lenin organised the Bolshevik Party, captured power, and founded the Soviet state, which he called the dictatorship of the proletariat, and, when he was being more accurate, the dictatorship of the Communist Party.

There is no record that he ever disputed a statement of Marx's. But to square all of Lenin with all of Marx is extremely difficult.

 Lenin regarded the party as an elite of hardened professional revolutionaries capable of knowing the relatively backward workers' interests better than the workers themselves. It must therefore be justified in using and means to make its will prevail. 

In contrast to Marx's contempt for concealment was Lenin's advice to members of the Communist Party that to capture strategic posts of power "it is necessary . . . to go the whole length of any sacrifice, if needed, to resort to strategy and adroitness, illegal proceedings, reticence, and subterfuge — to anything in order to penetrate ... at any cost, to carry on Communistic work. ..."

 When the saving revolutions that Lenin looked for in Germany and the industrially advanced west failed to develop, even with the sparkling of the Third International set-up in Moscow, he did not drop the power he got under such special conditions. He decided to dig in, build industry, await new tumults. 

War, he felt, must come — "the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with the imperialist states for any length of time is inconceivable."

 Lenin was succeeded, after a struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, by the latter, whose removal from the party secretaryship had been the outstanding point in Lenin's political testament.

 After a series of purges, political trials, and executions of most of their surviving old comrades, Stalin and a small group around him consolidated their dictatorship of the Communist Party and through it of the Soviet state.

 From proclaiming the goal of building "socialism in one country"— a revision of Lenin as well as of Marx — the Bolsheviks went on to a nationalism so strong that they claimed, with much justice, the mantles of ancient Russian national heroes, such as Peter the Great and even Ivan the Terrible.

 Thus was Marx reinterpreted again.

 During the last years of Lenin's life, Russian writers began referring to their gospel as "Marxism-Leninism" rather than simply as Marxism.

 After Lenin's death, Trotsky, in his attacks on Stalin, began referring invidiously to the current gospel as "Stalinism."

 For a time the use of this word was regarded by the regime as a sign of opposition and disloyalty. Then Soviet writers began referring to official doctrine as "Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism," and later as simply "Stalinism."

 This is now an official Soviet term.

 Leninism has been called "the Marxism of the imperialist epoch"; Stalinism may be called the Leninism of the epoch of the party dictatorship.

 Last February, Stalin made a speech about capitalism's doom and socialist revolution.

 Until then he had not talked like a Marxist in any important public speech since 1939, when he said that Russians can expect to achieve a stateless society only when socialism is victorious in all or most countries and "there is no more danger of attack."

 Then Marxism went into a wartime eclipse. Neither during the pact with Nazi Germany nor during the "great patriotic war" did Marx make a happy Soviet symbol. 

No longer were huge posters showing Marx's head a dominant feature of Moscow parades and meetings. Throughout the war his name was taboo in the chief Army publication, Red Star.

 True, Marx's writings continue to be analysed, worked over, dissected, and classified by Soviet authorities.

 But basic Soviet policy is largely independent of Marx.

 For example, he declared that "we Communists do not deign to conceal our aims." But Moscow-controlled Communist parties conceal and disguise themselves, e.g., in Cuba where the Communists call themselves Popular Socialists.

 On the other hand, whereas Marx opposed all reformers, the Communist Party cannot be counted on to do so, as Australian Labor leaders learned when it so embarrassingly endorsed them at the last election.

 Such subterfuges and compromises are mightily modified forms of Marxism. 

Nevertheless, to Russians, Marxism, as interpreted by their leaders, has given some-thing important in addition to the wide variety of propaganda masks suitable for all eventualities of the changing world scene.

 It has given them reason, as the world's sole great "proletarian nation," to be suspicious of nations that are not only foreign, but capitalistic, and has given certainty that they are full sail in the main stream of history, while capitalistic outlanders stupidly row against the current.

 Has Marxism bound Russia to turn on her late allies and organise, agitate, and, if necessary, fight until the revolution has triumphed in all or at least some of the dominant countries of the world?

 Although Russian spokesmen may quote Marx on this point now and then, to try to find the answer to the question in Marx is futile. For Soviet policy is neither world revolution nor simple nationalism; the two aspects exist simultaneously.

 To Russia's revolutionary policy, the nationalist aspect lends a dynamism derived from propaganda about a holy socialist fatherland flowing with liberty and security; to the nationalist policy the revolutionary aspect brings the services of disciples in every foreign land, organised to do Moscow's bidding.

 None of this is simple Marxism.

 All of it ignores Marx's warning that the outcome of human struggle may be progress under socialism, but that it may also be — a striking phrase today— "the common ruin of the contending classes."

 Karl Marx has had an influence so great as to be difficult to explain in terms of his own theory of history.

 Somehow his personality and intellectual achievement seem to loom larger than they should according to his theory, with its stress on broad social forces.

 Few careers pose the problem of the relation of the individual personality to history so sharply as does that of this son of the bourgeoisie who sacrificed comfort and family to the intellectual goal of building a classless society.

 Marx's money worries lasted until 1869, when Engels sold out his interest in Ermen and Engels, moved to London, and gave his friend a settled income.

 Jenny died in 1881, Marx in 1883 at his dusty scholar's desk, Engels in 1895, after publishing the second and third volumes of "Capital."

 Marx's daughter Eleanor committed suicide in 1898 at the age of 43 because of a disappointment in love.

 Another daughter, Laura, and her husband, Dr. Paul Lafargue, committed suicide at the age of 70, feeling that their useful years were over and not wishing to be a burden in old age and illness.

 The third daughter, Jenny Longuet, alone left progeny; her son Jean was a leading French Socialist; her grandson, Robert-Jean Longuet, is a French Socialist writer.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article248500951

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM.

 Vigilance and Faith in Democracy

Professor Laski's Warning

"The essential duty of British Socialists at the present time is to work for the conquest of a Parliamentary majority in a straightforward, constitutional way," says Professor Harold Laski, in a special article in the London "Daily Herald."

THE collapse of democratic systems in the post-war world has naturally tended to weaken the faith of all students of politics in both their validity and staying power.

Certainly nothing is gained from concealing from ourselves that they confront a crisis of the gravest magnitude, and that no realistic observer can doubt the profundity of the challenge they encounter.

But it is one thing to admit this; and it is quite a different thing to assume that the case for parliamentary democracy should be allowed to go by default.

Socialists, of all people, have the obligation to recognise the solid advantages it represents over most of its alternatives, and the justification they have for defending it as, so far in our experience, the surest path available to the conquest of political power.

A country which abandons Parliamentarism does so under conditions that involve a revolution either of the Left or of the Right.

In the former circumstance both the approach to and the maintenance of the revolutionary government depend upon conditions unlikely of realisation save in the aftermath of unsuccessful war.

European Examples.

This has been the experience both of Russia and Germany, and the strength of organised government in the Allied countries stands in striking contrast.

It would be folly to throw away the solid prospects we confront for an alternative that might well destroy the prospects of democracy in the next generation.

This, of course, applies not less to the idea of force used on behalf of reaction. The use of it is possible and in that event, no doubt, we should be ruled, in our special English fashion, by a Fascist dictatorship.

But only economic prosperity would justify this adventure to the masses ; and in the ill-will it would encounter we are entitled to doubt whether that prospect is even thinkable.

Major Disasters.

Were it to occur, every Socialist ought to realise from Continental experience that, compared with the habits of a Parliamentary system, this would be a major disaster. It would end trade-union freedom; it would destroy liberty of the press; it would destroy the prospect of any Socialist propaganda save in an obscure and underground form.

Almost certainly the masses would pay the price of its establishment by the loss of all social legislation passed in the last generation.

The whole effort of such a regime, as in Italy and Germany, would be to consolidate the powers of the propertied classes at the expense of the workers.

Experience Teaches.

The experience of Italy and Germany makes it clear:

(i) That this consolidation can, in terms of modern administrative technique, be very rapidly effected, and

(ii) That it can postpone the prospect of successful assault upon itself for a considerable period.

Duty of Socialists.

I believe, therefore, that the essential duty of Socialists at the present time is to work for the conquest of a Parliamentary majority in a straight-forward, constitutional way. Once that majority is obtained, it is their duty to use it for fully Socialist purposes, and if challenged to protect its right to such a use by all the means at its disposal.

It seems to me clear that such an attitude is far more likely to secure the purposes of Socialism than any alternative strategy.

It throws the onus of conflict, if there be a desire for it, on our opponents at a period when they are least likely to be successful in its promotion.

It rallies to the side of a Socialist Government that great body of middle opinion which is habituated to a belief in law and order. It splits, therefore, the ranks of the enemies of Socialism by compelling them, in circumstances where legal authority is hostile to them, to stake their cause upon a gambler's throw.

These, I think, are the circumstances, in which a reaction of violence from the Right has the least chance of obtaining its objectives.

Appeal To Reason.

My argument, up to this point, has been one built essentially upon strategic considerations. But there are other reasons of importance which make the defence of the Democratic system an urgent matter for Socialists.

There is an unfortunate tendency abroad, both on the extreme Right and on the extreme Left, to belittle the importance of reason and persuasion in the settlement of human affairs.

We speak of war as inevitable; the Right to do so on the ground of some alleged need of human nature, the Left as a necessary consequence of a capitalist society. We speak of dictatorship as inevitable; the Right do so because they see no other way of arresting the progress of Socialism, the Communists because they insist that only force can break the will of the opponents of Communism.

False Assumption.

The underlying assumption of this attitude is the futility of any method save that of force in the settlement of human differences.

I do not myself deny that there are occasions in the history of the world when these differences are so final that there is, in fact, no alternative but force to their settlement.

But I do not believe that the use of force is likely to be successful unless its employment is related to a previously widespread conviction of its necessity; and it is then at least a matter for discussion as to whether it will be necessary to employ it.

The enforcement of the Peace of Versailles by the victorious allies is an instance of the use of force to settle a dispute: I do not think it can be called a striking success.

The Case of Hitler.

The regime of Hitler is an example of the forcible imposition of a philosophy upon a population 13 millions of whom at least dissent vehemently from its implications; and it is, I suggest, obvious to most thinking persons that it will provoke its own violent overthrow sooner or later.

Because the use of reason is the high-road to the consolidation of power it seems to me urgent to rely upon it until it has been demonstrated that no attention to, or respect for, its conclusions is likely to be displayed by our opponents.

No Blind Faith.

This does not, in my judgment, imply that the task of the Labor Movement must be founded upon a blind faith in the hypotheses of democracy.

The old maxim that perpetual vigilance is the price of freedom was never so obviously true as in our day.

But it does mean that Socialists, with the example of Italy and Germany before them, have the duty to take freedom seriously, and to recognise that the secret of its persistence is courage in those whose business is its defence.

Democracy the Goal.

The way to lose freedom is to be careless of its importance, to spurn its opportunities, to belittle its significance. There has been a good deal of that temper in the Labor Movement; above all, as in the case of India and the unemployed, an inertia before attacks upon its foundations which has encouraged the reactionaries to go on with their work of destruction.

It is useless to deny that the next years are likely to be a period of momentous challenge to Socialists. They may well have to prove their faith on the battlefield. At least let them remember that the goal at which they aim is a democratic society; they cannot abandon their struggle to secure it while the power remains to keep the flame of reason alight.

Daily Standard (Brisbane, Qld.), 13 July 1933 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article183074262

A NEW AMERICA

 AMERICA remains, after Soviet Russia, the most exhilarating country in the world. It is a whirlpool of ideas.

 It has a receptivity to experiment, a passion for discussion, the intensity of which is literally bewildering. No one, I think, can say in what direction it is moving with any certitude. But that its pattern of life is changing at a speed greater than at any previous period is, I think, equally undeniable.

 The crisis has left changes of profound significance. The traditional belief in the leadership of business men has been rudely shaken. The conservatism of the universities has been greatly modified; even at places like Harvard and Yale intellectual leadership is in the hands of 'radical' undergraduates.

 The emphatic note of all significant American literature is one of protest; there is not today in American letters a single figure of any real importance on the conservative side.

 There is an awakening of labor to political consciousness, slow, indeed, but in a new way profound. There is a new zest among the younger generation for public service; Government work as an official has a new prestige value. There is a new sense of the State, a recognition that the old way of laissez-faire is decisively over.

 One constantly has the impression in the United States that its temper is like nothing so much as that of France in the generation before 1789. Doubt of all accepted values, eager exploration of novelty, a general atmosphere of insecurity, the widespread sense that great events are in the making—these are universal. Something new is being made. The one thing we do not know is the nature of the new thing. 

We do not know because, above all, those in America who have learned least from the crisis are its business men and the corporation lawyers who are their dependents. They are the Bourbons of contemporary America.

 Frightened out of their wits in 1933, now that profits are being earned again, their one anxiety is the repression of disturbing ideas. They are terrified even by the mild liberalism of the President. They are angry at any hint of radicalism from a university teacher. They even believe that the New Deal is, as one eminent professor put it, ten out of the twelve points of the Communist Manifesto. They have no programme to meet the problems of the new time. They hate the trade unions. The militancy of the farmer disturbs them greatly.

 One sound thing in America seems to them the immovable conservatism of the Supreme Court. They are beginning to find democracy a very dubious inheritance now that democracy is beginning to think in economic terms.

 * * * 

THE intellectuals, the mass of the workers outside the old craft trade unions, the bulk of youth, a growing section of the professional classes, not least of them the teachers, are aware that liberal America, the fabled land of opportunity, is in grave danger if big business regains its power.

 There is not, I think, any great increase in a steadfast adherence to Left opinion. But there is a deeper interest in Left opinion, a more constant sense of the importance of its thinking, than at any time in the history of the United States.

 That is not to say that the Left is going to win. Big business in America is very conscious of its power. It is more willing than any similar class in Europe to exhaust all its energy and its ingenuity to maintain it. Its latent Fascist temper is intense: and the vast army of unemployed is a fertile soil for Fascist ideas.

 The appeal of what Mr. Wells calls the "raucous voices," Dr. Townsend, Father Coughlin, and a score of lesser men, to the angry, the disappointed, the half-educated is an important one. Their link with big business is no more apparent to the multitude in America than was Hitler's to big business in Germany, or Mussolini's in Italy.

 There is a new America in the making, even though its contours are undetermined. If liberal America triumphs, it will make a new and fundamental contribution to our common civilisation; for the elements are there of a renaissance of the human spirit.

 But its victory has still to be won, while its defeat might open a grim and ugly chapter in the history of mankind. — By Professor Harold Laski, in 'The Daily Herald,' London.

Daily News (Perth, WA ), 6 April 1937 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article85698508

Influence of Patriotism on Modern Philosophy in Italy

 Prof. F. C. Bentivoglio B.A., Member of our Institution, on the invitation by the "Literary Club" of the Sydney University, delivered a lecture on the above subject.

 We are pleased to give hereunder the text of the lecture, as published by the "Corriere."

 Italy is often called the land of sunshine, of music, of art. It could be called also, and quite truthfully, the land of philosophers.

 Two centuries ago, in those few decades preceding the French Revolution, we see in Naples two of the world colossi writing epoch-making books on philosophy: Vico and Filangieri; in Milan, Beccaria. But ere long came the Napoleonic storm. What was thought inviolable, sacred and immortal, proved not to be so. In vain the Holy Alliance in 1815 tried to put back the clock of time, to ignore the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Encyclopaedists had flooded the world with their books. A new ferment had permeated all Universities, all intellectual centres.

 In Italy the movement for unification had had a powerful impetus from the Napoleonic wars. Sicilians, Neopolitans, Venetians, Lombards, etc., all shed their blood for the greatness of the French Empire. Why not fight for Italy, for one united and independent Italy?

 Italy only a geographical expression. What nonsense, says Vincenzo Gioberti, and he wrote "Il primato degli Italiani," proving the historical and spiritual right of Italy to be at last united.

 Romagnosi, Cattaneo, Ferrari — to quote only the most important philosophers — published book after book on this all-absorbing question.

 Mazzini, the prophet of Italy, had already preached for nearly thirty years in his "La Giovine Italia," a secret organisation whose members were all pledged to work, to fight, and to die, if needed, for the unification of Italy. Excitement was at fever heat in the year 1846, when a former gallant officer, the Count Giovanni Mastai Ferretti, was elected Pope Pius IX., who in a moment of enthusiasm exclaimed: "Great God, bless Italy." The Pope made an alliance with Sardinia and the King of the two Sicilies to fight Austria. But two months later he recalled his army. In fact, Sardinia remained on the field to fight single-handed.

 Patriotic citizens boycotted churches; some even embraced Protestantism. Thousands of priests resigned their office, enlisted, fought and died as brave sons of Italy. Those who survived entered the teaching profession, and through them the passion of patriotism became the daily bread served out to youth, thus permeating all families.

 Garibaldi had collected a battalion of gallant priests in Calabria in his memorable expedition of "The Thousand," and nicknamed the holy battalion.

 Is there any wonder if we see the most intellectual amongst those patriotic priests endeavour to justify their action, not only on historical and national grounds, but by assailing their opponents in their tenets and philosophy? The Church maintained that any national strife was but an incident in its fabric, which she claimed to be immortal. However, the patriots realised that an attack on religion was necessary to obtain the support of the mass. Religion represents the Absolute. The mass can only be stirred into action by the Absolute. Was not the same thing repeated during the Great War?

 Fight, fight on, brave boys; this is the last war. You are not killing your fellow-man; you are killing war. 

Hence an avalanche of books was published trying to prove that Christ never existed. Renan's, Strauss's "Life of Jesus" were in all homes. Biographies of Arnaldo da Brescia, Campanella, Pamponazzi, Giordano Bruno, all killed or burnt at the stake, were presented as prizes to young students. Beautiful monuments to those martyrs were erected in the piazzas.

 * * *

 Carducci, the famous poet, from his chair of Italian Literature at Bologna, inveighed for fifty years against the pious romanticism of Manzoni. Greek and Latin classicisms must be the rock foundation upon which should be built a united Italy.

 Could philosophers refrain from this battle? Here we have Gaetano Trezza, from Verona, a priest, a learned and good man. He attacked St. Thomas, writing most fiercely. He wrote on all topics bearing on the main subject. Also a magnificent Essay on Goethe, just because Faust represents a new conception of life, altogether contrasting with Christian ideals. At the end of an eventful life, the woman he loved died, leaving him alone, absolutely alone. He could not stand the blow. He recanted. The Church re-admitted him into its bosom, and he died Padre Bonvicino, in a cloister. Those mysterious threads which weave the spiritual cloak of our youth seem to weave also our shroud.

 R. Ardigo was born in a peasant home near Cremona in the year 1832. Boy of striking intelligence, he found only one road open to him: Holy Orders. He entered a Seminary in Mantua, and soon was a Doctor in Theology. He saw the hanging of nine Italians in 1851, whose only crime was their love for their country. He witnessed the furious fight between the Church and the patriots, and when forty years of age he declared in a very moving letter to his bishop (a holy man) that he no longer believed. While in the Seminary he was a zealous student of scholastic philosophy and modern science, firmly convinced that the "modern errors," as he called them, were to be refuted. Slowly an entirely new fabric of thought grew up in him, and finally it dawned upon him that he no longer espoused the dualistic teaching of the Church, but believed in a great continuity of things.

 The Minister of Public Education nominated him to the Chair of Philosophy at Padua. Undoubtedly the patriotic environment in which he lived had a great influence on his mental evolution. He was all his life a staunch patriot, and in 1918, when the war seemed lost, still a professor at the University, in a moment of despair he attempted suicide. He lingered on for another two years. He was the foremost writer on positive philosophy, and with his fifty years of teaching he had an overwhelming influence on the philosophical mind of his contemporaries.

 * * * 

G. Negri, a Milanese whose proud intellect would not mix with the populace, for whom he had the greatest contempt, maintained that Italy had made an historical and tragic mistake by wresting Rome from the Pope. He wrote the life of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, extolling this great man in his vain endeavour to resuscitate the gods and annihilate the Christian religion.

 Yet he, an atheist, shares the view of Livy and Macchiavelli, that religion is essential to a nation. Religious ties for the lower class are like spiritual and intellectual ties for the upper class.

 * * * 

Who does not know Giovanni Papini? A furious internationalist, communist, futurist, at the vanguard of every thought that sounded new, bizarre, impossible. He contributed thousands of writings to newspapers, attacking everything that was or seemed orthodox. He roamed all over the world in search of a new Gospel. Abroad he became enamoured of his own country. His health broke down, he returned to his native Tuscany, he shut himself in a hut, learned Greek and Hebrew, and wrote a "Vita di Cristo" that staggered the world. It is very little critical; it is almost a paraphrase of the four Gospels, and yet it is an extraordinary book. If its literary and philosophical value could be gauged by its sale we should say it is immense. Let it suffice to say that in the first year of its publication three and a half million copies were sold in the U.S.A. alone.

 * * * 

B. Croce, the eminent philosopher, is living on the heights of Naples amongst his books, almost in a monastic retirement. Some of his friends say he gives the cold shoulder to the present regime because Mussolini ignored him.

 "Croce himself," says Gentile, a well-known philosopher, "is a Fascist in spite of himself, who, notwithstanding his Hegelian foundations, he, more than any other single scholar, has revivified the Italian tradition and contributed by his historical researches to the development of Italian Stoicism: that is Fascism. He led a revolt against French and German philosophical systems which had permeated the intellectual lives of all Italian Schools and Universities.

 * * * 

G. Gentile, instead, directly Fascism went into power, was nominated Minister of Public Education. He was the first to tackle the great problem of teaching and making such sweeping changes in all departments as no other person in Italy or anywhere else has dared to make. "To teach well is not to pile up the baggage of bits of information on to the pupil and to impose upon him the result already given and completed by the thought of another, but, above all, to promote the activities of the pupil in the conquest of the scientific truths which are valuable only in so far as they are the results of his own work and represent his own conquest. Hence a syntheist in the person being educated is realised spontaneously every time he really educates himself, that is every time he feels the value of his own person in acquiring a new idea, undergoing a new experience, overcoming a limitation, widening the orbit of the life of his imagination. Our mind has a value not for what it knows materially, but for his capacity to win ever new knowledge. Hence the value of the school consists essentially in its enhancement of the ability to learn." 

* * *

 In the year 1909 died near Forli the philosopher Alfredo Oriani. If we had to judge him by his success in life it would not be worth our while to mention him at all. He wrote books, novels, short stories, poetry, dramas, all dismal failures. He wrote also on sociology. His startling prohecies make us pause and ponder over that singular intellect never understood. In his last book, "la Rivolta Ideale," 1906, he has exalted certain traditional spiritual values, judged Socialism not as creation, but mere criticism. He saw in the ascent of the proletariat not a new revolution approaching, but the birth of a new middle class, and expressed contempt for the cowardly theory which flattered the people by telling them that their inferiority was only due to the injustice of the law. He despised these pseudo philosophers — political opportunists who could explain everything they saw, standing as it were at the window, but it never occurred to them to go in the street and take a hand in anything. The systems they propounded were an end in themselves. They led nowhere and could not serve as practical programmes. By them, everything could be explained, but nothing predicted. In the fifty years preceding the Fascist regime materialism and positivism reigned supreme in lecture rooms, press and books. The Italian spirit was in a state of torpor. Oriani in his last writings set forth with unmatchable passion all problems, anxieties, ideals, hopes of our times, exalting the potential Italian energies. He revolted against the deadening levelling tendency of democracy, socialism and the orthodox Church. Above all, he preached the dawn of a greater Italy.

 I must go into further details about Oriani, as he has been acclaimed the philosopher, the prophet, the saviour of Fascism.

 Nietzche divides humanity in two classes, aristocracy and the commons, denying almost every right to the latter, which should simply remain a tool for the elevation of the former. Oriani instead maintains that aristocracy and genius are pushing along "the mass," giving it value and bringing out its best men to join the "leaders," shape its course, and give a name to it.

 The mass is moved into action by instinct, the Aristocracy of Intelligence represents its conscience, while genius is its personification. Everything is elaborated in that immense cauldron, but is completed and shaped in its dynamic force by the intelligentsia.

 And if for Nietzche aristocracy meant something apart, altogether detached and differentiated, for Oriani it meant the highest exponent of society, the symbol of its purest ideals, "leader of the mass and its servant." Hence it must be a throng of heroes who realises its duties not only toward one part of humanity, but to-ward everybody. Heroes ready for all emergencies, ready for all sacrifices.

 The liberty of which democracy speaks is purely a lie. Only "authority" can bring justice. Contrasting interests, supported by ever-changing political parties, prevent justice from being meted out with even measure. Oriani wept at the ineptitude of Italy in colonial warfare. "Italy," he cries, "slave of an idle and ignorant democracy. Revolt, my beloved country, against everything and everybody. Light all your beacons because a revolution has begun. It has set out in the darkest of nights, but the dawn is near. The flush of dawn may look like blood, but fear not, march on, democracy is doomed." And with an astonishing prophetical afflatus Oriani in 1897 foresaw the world war, the fall of the great empires, the disruption and turmoil of the Slavonic world, and the overbearing plutocracy of the U.S.A. Also the progress and set-back of Socialism, the rousing of sane minorities destined to become the new aristocracy, different from those of blood and wealth.

 He hated Socialism not only for its ideologic substratum which could be a poetical mistake, but because it was a school of makeshift, of corruption and moral mediocrity. He maintained Socialism to be but a small tyranny, inefficient and timid, set up by a bogus aristocracy, the offspring of industrial labour, and by means of universal suffrage. Unscrupulous demagogues, weaklings, biologically, by pandering to the mass, became the rulers of nations.

 Could Oriani rise from his grave to-day and see the work of his formidable pupil, Mussolini. A new Italy, his beloved Italy, a great nation at last, setting to a bewildered world an example of a new national organisation in which the rights of labour and capitalism, the principle of authority and the principle of private initiative, the exigency of tradition, and needs of a new era are harmonised in a united effort to create and produce the moral and material wealth of the nation.

 MUSSOLINI.

 Mussolini is supposed to have taken his main ideas from G. Sorel and his philosophy from Oriani in building his Co-operative State. Two months ago Mussolini was asked by the compilers of the Enciclopedia Italiana to give in brief the essence of Fascism for publishing purposes. It was a very difficult task to translate it and reduce it to the essentials. However, here it is: "There cannot be a conception of the State which is not fundamentally a conception of life. Philosophy and intuition; system of ideas developing in logical sequence, united in vision and faith, but, virtually, an organic conception of the world.

 So Fascism is not to be understood in its many practical aspects as the organisation of a method, as a system of education, as discipline, but in its general working as conception of life. It works spiritually. The world, for Fascism, is not the material superficial world, where each is an individual, apart from his fellows, standing alone, governed by a natural law which induces him instinctively to lead a life of selfish and temporal pleasure. Each Fascist is a unit of the nation, obeying a moral law which binds individuals and races together in a tradition and in a mission which suppresses the instinct to live only for a brief round of pleasure; teaching, instead, the obligation of a higher life, self-denial by sacrifice of his own interests, even of his own life. Spiritual conception, therefore, arising from the general reaction of the age against the feeble and material positivism of the 19th century. Not sceptic, nor agnostic, nor pessimistic, nor positively optimistic like most of the theories (all negative) which would give the centre of life a place apart from man, who, with his free will can and should create his world for him-self. Fascism desires to rouse man to devote the whole of his power to action, bravely to recognise such difficulties as exist and to be ready to meet them.

 Fascism conceives life as a struggle where it is the part of each to gain for himself that which is really worthy of him, creating first of all in himself the instrument (physical, moral or intellectual) to achieve it, and as for the individual, so for the nation, so for humanity. Hence the great value of culture in all its forms, art, religion, science, and the superlative importance of education. Hence also the essential value of labor, by which man conquers Nature and creates the world, economic, political, moral and intellectual. This positive conception of life is manifestly an ethical conception. Every action must conform to moral judgment; nothing in the world can dispense with the value of striving towards moral ends. Life must be serious, austere, religious. Fascism scorns a "comfortable" life. It is a historical conception, in which man has only his being in the function of the spiritual process with which he co-operates, in the domestic and social groups, in the nation and in history, in which all nations co-operate. Hence the great value of tradition in memories, in language, in custom, in rules of social life.

 Without history man is nothing. 

Therefore, Fascism is contrary to all individual abstraction, with material foundation of the type of the 18th century, and is contrary also to Utopian and Jacobin innovations. It does not believe in the possibility of happiness on earth, as was the desire of the economist literature of 1700, and therefore rejects all the theological conceptions of a definite systematising of the human race at a certain period of history. That means going beyond history and life, which is continuous, flowing and developing. Fascism desires to be, politically, a realistic doctrine. Practically, it aims at solving only the problems which (history shows) have always presented themselves, and which automatically find or suggest their own solution. To operate amongst men, as in Nature, it is necessary to understand intrinsic processes and to master the powers in action.

 The Fascist conception is against individualism and for the State. It is for the individual in so far as the universal conscience and will of man in his historic existence agrees with the State. It is against classic liberalism, which arose from the need of reacting from absolutism and whose historic function passed when the State became the conscience and will of the people themselves. Liberalism denies the State in the interest of the private individual, Fascism declares the State to be the true personality of the individual. And if liberty should be the attribute of the real man and not of the puppet abstraction conceived by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism is for liberty and for the sole liberty which can be a serious matter, liberty of the State and of the individual included in the State.

 The Fascist State is synthesis and unity of every value. It interprets, develops and strengthens the whole life of the people. Therefore Fascism is contrary to Socialism, which cramps the historic movement in the class struggle and ignores the State unity which fuses classes into one economic and moral whole. Similarly, it is opposed to class syndicalism. Fascism recognises those exigencies in the orbit of the State from which syndicalism and the socialist movement derive their origin, and would consider them in the system of corporate interests conciliated in the unity of the State. It is not the nation which generates the State according to the obsolete conception which formed the base of the democratic States of the 19th century. On the contrary, the nation is created by the State, which conscious of its own moral unity gives to the people will power and thence effective existence. The right of a nation to independence comes not from a literary and idealistic consciousness of its own being, far less from a situation more or less unconscious or inert, but from an alert conscience from a will ready to act and prepared to declare its own right. In fact, the State, as Universal Ethical will, is the creation of the right.

 The nation, like the State, is an ethical fact which exists and lives while it develops. Stagnation means death. Therefore the State is not only authority which governs and gives laws and values of spiritual life to the individual wills, but it is also power which makes its will recognised and respected abroad, thus demonstrating its universality in all directions necessary to its development. The Fascist State is power, but spiritual power which includes all forms of moral and intellectual human life. It cannot therefore be limited to the simple function of order and protection, as liberalism would do. It is not a mere mechanism which defines the sphere of presumed individual liberty. Fascism, finally, is not only law-giver and founder of spiritual life. It would not remake the rules of human life, but its content : man, his character, his faith.

 And to this end it would have discipline and authority to penetrate deeply in the mind, and there to rule unchallenged.

 Therefore, its standard is the lictoral fasces, Symbol of Unity, Power and Justice."

 * * *

 Students of the University! You are on the threshold of life. Fortunate are you. A new world is coming into being. You only can shape it. What it is going to be no one knows. But the duel has started already: Intelligence versus the Mass; quality versus quantity; in short, democracy as it is commonly understood is on its trial. Allow me to urge you to take, as soon as you can, a hand in the affairs of our beloved country, Australia. Discard that shameful pandering to the lowest instinct of the populace, do not put the crowd on a pedestal and worship it. Tell everybody that you are the torch-bearers, that you must be the rulers. The mass must follow. The mass in its millennial evolution has remained a minor; it must be assisted, protected, stimulated, but never allowed to govern.

 There is to-day a greater gulf in vision of life and mental outlook between you and the man in the street than between Charlemagne and his swine-herd. And, do foster a healthy intercourse amongst spiritual leaders of all nations. Ideas, new ideas, we need, or we go under. A country aiming to be self-supporting, self-contained, is doomed. There are no water-tight compartments in the world, either moral, intellectual or economic.

 Here I have a vision: Who is that weary giant stumbling along with the sphere on his shoulder? He is Atlas, carrying the world. "Whither goest thou, Father Atlas? What is wrong with thee?" "This world is out of joint, and unless I find a remedy it may slip from my shoulders into chaos."

 Here a horde of tailors cobblers, mechanics of all sorts, cry to him: "Let us assist thee, Comrade Atlas; we have the panacea for all ailments." "Begone ye all, begone," he answered. "There in the dim distance I see the beacon light, the salvation of this unbalanced world. There it stands! A group of stately buildings; it is the University. Only Science, graced by love, which is understanding, can save the world. I will go there." 

Ladies and gentlemen, don't you hear Atlas knocking at the portals?

Italian Bulletin of Commerce (Sydney) 1 October 1932, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article259097537

Popular Sovereignty a Successful Reality

 By ALBERT RITCHIE. Governor of Maryland.

The political problem of the ages has always been how to reconcile the powers of government with the liberties of the individual. If we trace this effort historically, we find that through the centuries government has overwhelmed liberty, in that the freedom of the individual against despotic power has generally depended upon the benevolence of government itself. By and large there has been no sovereign power back of and independent of government, guaranteeing the individual immunity as of right against the excess of governmental authority, and protecting him in that immunity. As a result, governmental benevolence in the old world has recurrently developed into governmental despotism, intolerance and tyranny. In this country we sought to solve the problem by recognising behind government a sovereign power superior to government. This power was in the people, and we devised a governmental system whereby the liberties of the people no longer depended upon the grace or favour of governmental authority, but whereby governmental authority itself was granted and defined, circumscribed and limited by the sovereign people themselves. Now comes a contemporary European viewpoint which is both confusing and paradoxical. With an obvious upsurging of social democracy there comes also a declining faith in its political virtue. Socially and politically, democracy seems to mean one thing here, and something quite different there.

 Monarchical Absolutism.

 Mussolini, who personifies this viewpoint, may share our own democratic condemnation of monarchical absolutism, but he has a monarchical concept of popular sovereignty. He is perhaps the first dictator in history to formulate a philosophy of democratic autocracy, if such a thing can be conceived of. The masses, he is sure, cannot govern themselves intelligently, because they will follow foolish leaders or be exploited by corrupt ones; and representative government is doomed to failure, because it exhausts itself in building a village and so is incapable of building a nation. Like the Kaiser, he believes that the strong State can best be achieved by a sort of self-perpetuating governing class, which will function as guardian or trustee for the people in the selection of their law-making body, and in decreeing the customs and practices to which they must conform. "Liberty," Mussolini says, "never existed," and in place of a government with its powers defined and limited by a popular sovereignty which creates and controls it, he sets up a government which "governs for all, over the heads of all, and if necessary, against all."

 Adequacy of Political System.

 I pass the very obvious point that if this view of government had prevailed in pre-Revolutionary Colonial days, and our American forefathers had submitted to it, then there would have been no War of Independence, and no United States of America to-day. Perhaps even Mussolini and the Kaiser would not insist that the British Government knew better than we did what destiny was good for us, and that we had no right to demand and win freedom to govern ourselves. So merely to state what would have been the result of their governmental theories over here may be sufficient to refute them so far as their applicability to this country is concerned. "However this may be, I am convinced that nothing could so chill our national spirit, or check our prosperity and the progressive solution of our political problems, as to have our leaders or our people, or the growing youth of our land, lose faith in the workings of popular government, or in the adequacy of our political system, or fail to realise that the revolutionary ideas now prevalent abroad are wholly foreign to the genius of our people.

 Definition of Democracy.

 We need not concern ourselves with any analysis of the nature of sovereignty, nor with any abstract definition of democracy. Suffice it to say that democracy, in its broadest aspect, is not a form of government, but a social and political ideal, which contemplates a society of equals in the sense that each person contributes an integral something which goes to make up the common life ; a society in which no one can avoid his share of responsibility for the interest and welfare of all, and in which every one shall have an equal opportunity for self-development according his capacity. Democracy distinctly does not contemplate a society after the Fascist or Communist idea, in which the individual members, instead of having the free opportunity to develop themselves according to their free choice, are told from above what they are to do, and have their parts in life assigned to them in a way that submerges personality. Now, it need not be urged that a government of the Mussolini type, with the people subservient to it instead of it subservient to the people, must necessarily be malign. It may indeed be admitted that given a high order of wisdom, integrity and good luck, you may sometimes, for the moment at least, get a stronger government that way than you can by popular ballot. But it by no means follows that you can get a better government, because even a bad government that is free may be better than a good government that is self-perpetuating and breeds within itself the germs of despotism and tyranny.

 Trend to Dictatorships in Europe.

 In Europe the very word "government" means to the average man something different from what it means to us. There they have always had a governing class, and political power as well as political opinion have usually been the power and opinion of that class. Then there is another European condition which, while possibly transitory, is too vital now to be overlooked. Ten years after a war fought to end wars and make the world safe for democracy, we see not only the new-born Governments of the Old World, but to a considerable extent the older Governments too, turning from parliamentary forms of democratic expression back to the rule of dictators. With kingdoms and dynasties and principalities gone, with Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs and Romanovs either dead or in exile, the realities of popular government have not taken their places. We may as well admit that this result is an amazing one, but it would be a superficial view indeed that accepted it as a permanent stage in the progress or evolution of government. 

Huge Public Debts.

 I have no thought to dwell in any detail upon the war-worn condition of Europe when peace finally came, or upon the giant task of restoring order out of chaos. The story is familiar enough, and the difficulties of reconstruction too recent or contemporaneous to need accounting. The hang-over of war waste and extravagant expenditure, huge public debts, undetermined international obligations, an inflated currency, unbalanced budgets, upset markets, industry diverted into abnormal channel, widespread unemployment, industrial unrest, an economic structure entirely out of joint— such were the conditions which the countries of Europe had to face and remedy before they could take their place again in the normal progress of history. 

Economic Order Restored.

 Perhaps the task may have been one, in some countries may still be one, for the autocrat or dictator, just as the task of winning the war was undoubtedly one for the autocrat or dictator. Wars are won by the sweep of driving leadership, and driving leadership may be necessary, too, for the scarcely less herculean task of restoring economic order. The philosopher Hegel said that nothing can be considered as settled historically until it repeats itself. If so, then certainly the chronicles of history show that after every great war there has been a recoil to much the same kind of dictatorship that the world is witnessing to-day in some of the countries of Europe. After the Persian wars— Pericles. After the Peloponnesian wars — Philip of Macedon. After the Punic wars— Caesar. After the collapse of Rome — Charlemagne. After the Wars of the Roses — the Tudor dynasty. After the English Civil War — Cromwell. After the French Revolution—Napoleon. My point here is that in the sweep of history this may be but a temporary and passing condition in Europe, which may be only an interruption of progress towards ultimate popular sovereignty.

 Insurmountable Difficulties.

 Turn now to our own country, where of course the war caused no economic upset or disarrangement even faintly comparable to that in Europe. Here, the story is an altogether different one. Here, popular sovereignty is not a dream or a distant hope, but a political reality which finds expression every day and whose organisation and growth can be clearly traced. With us democracy is no new doctrine evolved by political science or by legerdemain, but an actuality achieved through evolutionary processes. We did not secure it by the grace of kings. Nobody conferred it on us. Our Constitution itself did not create it, but we had it "ab initio," and it created our Constitution. Let me go back for a moment, because this is important. Sir Edwin Sandys, the leading spirit of the London (or Virginia) Company, and his associates who crossed the Atlantic, may have regarded it all as a great adventure, as some believe, but the form their adventure took was to establish in the New World those principles of representative democracy which they could not establish in the Old World so long as James I, with his ideas of divine right, ruled there. Gradually and in the face of difficulties almost insurmountable, the great experiment proved its worth, and long years before the founding fathers of the Republic came, men who craved freedom and liberty thronged to our coast— the Plymouth fathers to Massachusetts, the Calverts to Maryland, Roger Williams to Rhode Island, Oglethorpe to Georgia, William Penn to Pennsylvania— and here on virgin soil their new-born spirit took root and flourished.

 Colonial Democracy.

 Thus the Constitution became a living institution and the expression of our political life and mind. Its strength was the strength of the American spirit. It did not spring from the brains of the extraordinary men who gave it form and body, but from the heart and experience and ideals of the long years of a colonial democracy striving to become a nation. So in passing judgment on governmental systems at home and abroad it is important to remember the evolutionary character of our own system. This represents, it is true, many compromises and adjustments needed to meet conflicting requirements and ideals, it even reflects some of the fears and dangers of democracy itself, and all this has helped to make it workable and effective. But its vitality does not spring from these facts alone. Its abiding strength lies in the fact that it was born of the people, blood of their blood and flesh of their flesh, and gave expression to the traditions, ideals and free spirit that animated them in their century old efforts for self-government. Pessimists and critics, to be sure, can find defects enough in our system of government, and indeed we need not venerate it unduly or hold it sacrosanct, for after all it has successfully met the tests and crises of our national existence for nearly a century and a half, and this alone should silence callow criticism and foolish fears as to its future. It has changed and been changed with changing times, and not always for the best, but the cardinal fact is that it works, and has worked from  the very beginning. Let us see if this is not so.

 State against State.

 After the Revolutionary War there almost instantly arose in this country a condition akin to what followed the World War in some of the countries of Europe and threatened in others. The thirteen original States, sovereign and independent at last, fell apart. State was allied against State, class against class, interest against interest. So desperate was the situation that, as Madison wrote Edward Pendleton, some leading minds were advocating a monarchy, while the bulk of the people probably preferred a partition of the Union into three more practicable and energetic governments. Then, none too soon, the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, and out of the travail of that convention our system of government emerged, and it united the thirteen discordant States into a Federal Republic, and has held them indivisible ever since.

Triumph of Liberty in New World.

 Can one ask more practical demonstration of the effectiveness of our form of government than this? If so, another one, equally obvious, is at hand, for soon our hard won popular sovereignty was subjected to as determined a test as was ever conceived by a group of autocratic rulers believing in the divine right of kings. The Russian Czar, the Prussian King, the Austrian Emperor and the French King combined with the purpose of stamping our popular liberty in the western world. They called themselves the Holy Alliance. The spirit of liberty which had established itself in America was rising to the surface elsewhere, too. It was rising in Poland, in Austria, in Italy and in Spain, and these monarchs sought to crush by the might of their enslaved peoples. In South America, Spain had lost her colonies and these had set up their own forms of Government. The Russian Czar, the Prussian King and the Austrian Emperor were to send their combined forces across the seas in order to restore these republics to the Spanish King.

 Armed Conflict.

 Then democratised England proposed to the United States— both just emerged from their second armed conflict in less than half a century — an alliance to preserve the independence of the republics of South America, and thus, as Jefferson wrote, "make our hemisphere one of freedom" and "emancipate at one stroke a whole continent." This was not effected, because the despotic purpose of the Holy Alliance was dashed to earth by the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine with the approval and support of Great Britain, and thus it was that the power of autocracy was checked and overthrown by the spirit of liberty and popular sovereignty which two peoples had established as their governmental creed. Thus the American form of popular government began in effectiveness and success, and thus from the adoption of the first twelve amendments, which may properly regarded as part of it, it continued for more than a century with no single change save the three political amendments which reflected the results of the battle-fields of the Civil War.

 Greatest Country on Earth.

 Under it we have emerged from small beginnings into what we believe is the greatest country on earth. During this long period the sail-boat became the ocean liner, the stage coach became the trans-continental railway. Morse gave us the telegraph. Bell the telephone, and the Wrights conquered the air. Steam ushered in the marvellous era of machine production, followed now by an era of mass production on an undreamed of scale, and electricity and power have wrung new wealth from the treasure house of nature and hold the possibilities of a world remade. And all of this under a government dependent not only upon the theory but upon the actuality of popular sovereignty! So much for what democracy in America has achieved. Now for a few other considerations. One may well ask, what autocrat or dictator at his best ever did more than bring order out of chaos for a while? Did any of them ever work for the interests of all in the long run? And however benevolent and wise, have they not almost always yielded to the urge of personal ambition, or become the source of oppression and injustice, from which there lay no appeal, or burdened some classes for the benefit of others, and thus stifled the free play of individual enterprise?

 No Guarantee.

 And when Mussolini, or any other dictator like him, leaves the scene, what then? I will not debate the question whether Italy has needed this strong hand temporarily. Even if it has, there is no guarantee, there is indeed no probability, that another man of equal force and ability will arise to carry on the constructive part of his work. If he carries it on for his own life time, he may still be followed by a group which will take a purely selfish view of their enormous powers, and exploit the very people he would protect from the like danger under a democracy. Or he may be followed by men so weak that the pendulum will swing back again toward disintegration. Pericles destroyed the great court of Areopagus, which vetoed legislation that violated the liberty of the Athenian people, and then came his personal rule of Athens for a third of a century. He exercised his despotic power with wisdom and moderation, but he had no successor. His death ended the brilliant period in Greek history, and soon the political centre of the world moved westward and the empire of Rome began. Likewise there was no successor to govern the world Alexander the Great had conquered, and when Napoleon reached the zenith of his power, the question that troubled him most was how to fortify and make permanent the political structure he had erected. History shows how utterly futile his efforts were.

 Self-Imposed Tyranny.

 Thus the work of any dictator, no matter what its value, may be undone at any time by his death. Is it not better to cling to a system of popular participation, in which the swings of the pendulum from left to right, from liberalism to conservatism and back again, are not violent and accompanied by Fascist tyranny on the one hand, or by the French and Russian reigns of terror on the other hand? It is true that in democracy, as in autocracy, individual liberty may be abridged in many ways, sometimes necessarily, sometimes unnecessarily, or even foolishly and unjustifiably. But when this happens in a democracy we do not bend the suppliant knee to any ruler. Here is the essence of popular sovereignty. If there be tyranny, it is at least the self-imposed tyranny of a free acting or of an acquiescing majority. I believe it was Lord Bryce who said that democracy furnishes a political master key that can unlock every door, and John Stuart Mill long ago said that if the rights and interests of individuals in a democracy are disregarded, it is because they are not disposed to stand up for them. That representative government should sometimes fail to express adequately the will of the people is not so important as it is that the popular will, within sound constitutional limitations, should be free to act and that it should have the machinery to put its action into effect.

The Power of Public Sentiment.

 Popular sovereignty functions not only through our machinery of government, but equally through the effective force and play of public opinion upon government. And just here we meet another criticism from our despotic friends. They talk much about mob psychology, the inefficiency and incapability of the herd, and the wrong standards of mass instinct. They have been talking that way ever since man first strove for freedom, and the truth is they do not see the woods for the trees. The instinct of the masses may be sounder than the instinct of the politically self-anointed. In fact there is usually an element of sound sense and true instinct in every mass movement. Lincoln's apothegms about the wisdom of the people and about fooling them are political truisms. I believe he was right when he said, "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

 Governmental Corruption.

 Because public sentiment so often seems non-existent, or quiescent, or sterile, or foolish, or difficult to understand, we both underrate it and overrate it. It may be passive and apparently impotent to-day, and be all-powerful to-morrow. Let an ambitious State Department, for instance, imagine that our manifest destiny points to the need of an imperial navy, and we see public opinion rise overnight and assert the effective sovereignty of the people. Let governmental corruption reveal that it is not confined to isolated miscreants and public opinion, as I believe we are about to see, will quickly operate as a political force. There may for a time be acquiescence in the evils of excessive officialdom or bureaucratic control, but let the advocates of these things go too far, let them approach legislative or executive autocracy, and public opinion will become an effective check. Yet public opinion seems to be precisely the factor that your Kaiser or your autocrat never understands, although history reveals that every great reform or political step forward has always sprung from the people — from the lower and humbler classes. Men like Jefferson may have formulated principles, but it has been the masses that gave them the impulse of life.

 Deadening Influence upon Character.

 Nor must we overlook the deadening influence of a dictatorship upon character. One man or one group of men manages the entire affairs of a people grown or coerced into political and mental passiveness. The individual has no voice or potentiality in his own destiny. Everything is decided for him by a superior will he is required to obey. Jefferson said, "the freedom and happiness of man are the sole objects of all legitimate government.” Man's happiness requires that his worth and dignity and character be accentuated and developed. If this be the high end of human institutions, then certainly it can best be attained by cultivating in man the qualities of self-reliance, self-respect, self-control and self-discipline, and by giving him a consciousness of that equality with all other men that can come only from regarding himself as a determining factor and force in his political and civic life. It can never be attained by hampering and dwarfing man's healthy growth through the palsying effect of a paternalism ruling and directing him from above.

 Wise Leadership.

 It is said with truth that wise leadership is essential to wise government, that particularly is this so in the case of a representative government, but that such governments are not always productive of the most capable political leadership. Lord Bryce commented on this at length in his "American Commonwealth." No one will contend that our democracy has not produced great leaders, and if, as James M. Beck says in his recent book on the Constitution, contemporary history shows a decay in this regard, at least it can be affirmed that our leaders are selected under a system which gives all classes in the community the opportunity of choosing them, and the opportunity of turning them out if popular dissatisfaction is great enough. If it be said that under a democracy the people are liable to be exploited, I answer that under an autocracy they are likewise liable to be exploited, with the additional evil that the exploitation would be legalised through the dictator's legalised control. But in a democracy the issue can always be placed before the electorate at the next election, and the people can turn the Ins out and put the Outs in.

 Democracy a Force for Peace.

 There is at least one other asset of popular sovereignty, and it is very vital. If the record of democratic nations does not show an altogether clean slate in the matter of aggression, still it cannot be denied that autocracy and dictatorship tend to war rather than to peace. The people lack the agencies of democratic government for the expression and dictation of their own will, and must respond to the will of their rulers. All history shows this, and the danger of it to the peace of the world. Were not the military autocracies of Germany and Russia peculiarly menacing to world peace before 1914? Does not Mussolini personify the chief anxiety for the peace of Europe now? Indeed our own war of Independence was forced upon us not so much because the English people wanted it, as because the English King and ministry decreed it. Men like Burke and Pitt and Fox reflected the views of a great part of the English population, but their voice was politically inarticulate and unheeded. When English rule was overthrown, it fell not alone before the onslaught of American troops, but also before the opposition of the people at home which finally made itself effective. And this popular opposition and the war's reaction, by the way, did much to secure self-government in England's colonial empire.

 Struggle for Armament.

 On the other side of the picture, consider the continuous peace for more than a century between the United States and our neighbour Canada. The struggle for armament between these two countries was stopped by mutual agreement after the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, and ever since the border line between them has been no more a line of division than a line of friendship. There are no forts on either frontier, no warships on the Great Lakes. May not the reason be that in neither country do the people respond to the power of a dictatorial government superimposing upon them its will and ambitions, but that in both countries the Government, functioning through popular sovereignty, though in different forms, responds to the will of the people, whose ideals and wishes are for friendship and for peace? To-day problems galore crowd upon us, those growing out of industrialism and urbanism, the increase of wealth, the inequality of its distribution, the assimilation of immigrants, agrarian questions, the concentration of power, the abridgement of individual liberty, and what not. Many of these may show anti-democratic tendencies, but neither the problems themselves nor the difficulties they involve are due to defects in our governmental system or to the inability of popular sovereignty to function. The way out is not to be found in autocratic government. Indeed, I venture the assertion that at least some of the major ills in American politics have arisen from the failure to observe some of the principles of our governmental system, such, for instance, as the balance between State and National powers and the basic doctrine of local self-government.

 Solution of Problems.

 After all, it is actual experience that counts most, and whatever its defects the great American experiment is popular sovereignty has had amazing success. It is the oldest written form of government in the world to-day. It has resolved the problems of our past, even those which threatened national disintegration, and its mechanism can resolve the problems of our present and of our future. This is not a static world, and what is needed is not cynicism, but a just faith born of the accomplishments of the past. If the path of progress through democracy and liberalism is slow, if it must be tested out by the experience of trial and error, at least the path thus offered is the only one that is safe. If gradual processes are inevitable for democratic ideals, at least these processes are onward and upward. We have shown in this country that political liberty can be made a political reality ; that freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of self-determination, of self-government are more than abstract ideas. All this is proof that popular sovereignty is not a myth, that expression is better than suppression. Here the people have shown that they can govern themselves, and that they can produce leaders who will love justice and do justice, and who will serve their nation both faithfully and wisely even though they be only servants and not rulers.

Catholic Advocate (Brisbane, Qld. : 1928,http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article258733303