State Socialism is being evolved.

 IT is a favorite figure of speech to describe the present state of Europe as a vast military camp, in which so many millions of men, continually under arms, are merely awaiting the signal to slaughter each other wholesale and drown the civilisation of the Old World in a sea of blood. This Turneresque "symphony in black and red" has done yeoman's duty throughout the press for a good many years, yet the sanguinary cataclysm still keeps off and the camp simile with its contingent horrors is becoming just a trifle stale. If, however, we read the signs of the times aright, it should seem that a greater peril than even war is menacing European society, and that the millions of disciplined murderers and plunderers are themselves standing over a volcanic abyss, which may at any moment yawn to engulf them all.

For weeks past the principal items reported by telegraphic agents refer to wide spread manifestations of a revolutionary character, together with other symptoms sufficiently discomposing to that class of cabinet philosophers who hug themselves in the comforting belief that the existing order of society, as developed under the various phrases of modern civilization, is the best possible — for themselves. Strikes of colliers, iron founders, and other workmen, on a scale, and with a concerted unanimity of organization hitherto unwitnessed on the continent, have simultaneously paralysed industry in centres so numerous and so remote from each other as to argue the existence of some deeper moving cause than the old grievance of low wages to the laborer and disproportionate profit to the capitalist. In Belgium, in Westphalia, in Silesia the workmen have turned out by hundreds of thousands, and although by the joint influence of substantial concessions from the masters and threats of military intervention on the part of the authorities the men have very generally returned to their respective occupations, the spirit of discontent yet smoulders, ready to break out again under the stress of a bad harvest or a severe winter. In Northern Italy, where the rural population have for years past developed special forms of disease due to exposure and deficient nutrition, the crushing imposts rendered necessary by the insane determination of Italian statesmen to prop up the young kingdom with a forest of ironclads, has led to a rebellion of the unprotected peasants, which breaks out afresh as fast as it is put down. Strikes and Jacqueries are not of course novel phenomena ; but besides the magnitude of the numbers and interests involved on the present occasion, they are marked with special peculiarities, rarely, if ever, observed before, the occurrence of which may be of service in diagnosing the evil and discovering the remedy. One of these symptoms is the sympathy with which the demands and aims of the operatives on strike are generally viewed by the burgher or middle class; another, the obvious unwillingness of the governments to proceed to extremities for the purpose of restoring order. Both these tendencies are so unlike what has been seen on other occasions, so inconsistent with the usual intolerant and arbitrary temper of the "classes" referred to, that the latter must on some ground or other have come to regard their present position as severely imperilled, if not actually untenable.

 The converse of strikes, the combinations of labor to raise wages, are those combinations of capital to raise prices, which go under the name of "corners" or "rings." They are one of the lefthanded blessings that the old world owes to the new, where they were the direct fruit of the vast accumulations of capital in unrighteous hands that followed the War of Secession. It was in the years immediately succeeding that great national convulsion that the power of the purse, developed out of the hideous frauds and corruption incidental to the great army contracts, first made itself felt as a vast and often mischievous social factor. "Rings" batten on the oppression of the working classes and the blackmailing of the whole body of consumers ; and it is therefore not strange that with their appearance in the United States other correlated social phenomena, previously unfrequent or unknown, became common. The great strikes in the coal and iron districts of Pennsylvania and Ohio were a direct result of the concentration of the vast profits of railway carriage in a few hands, and the consequent screwing up of railway freights, which form so serious an item in the cost of foundry goods, to a figure that would let neither the ironmasters nor their men to subsist. Co-operation among the aggrieved sections of the people has since done much to tone down the outrageous exactions to which the American nation has been subjected by its self-made millionaires ; but the great strikes have left a painful memento of the stressful period that gave them birth, in the evolution of a previously unrecognised social entity, the "tramp." This unclassed being, who has since acquired fixed professional characteristics, and whose presence threatens to become a permanent evil, is to America the equivalent of the mass of inveterate pauperism that underlies European society. 

Now what do these facts tend to? Clearly, the remodelling of civilized society on a social, or more strictly a socialist, basis. Rings as well as strikes and co-operative associations are socialistic in their tendency, for although the aim of the first is to limit production and concentrate distribution for the benefit of a few, of the second to enhance the cost of production for the benefit of the producers, and of the third to promote a healthy balance or supply and demand for the mutual benefit of a limited circle of producers and consumers, they all three in their several ways are helping to work out the practical problems that must be solved before socialism can emerge from the realm of theory into that of practical reality. Some of these problems, for instance that of the possibility of controlling by any code of fixed rules the capricious and haphazard interaction of the many complex forces that determine such apparently simple processes as production and consumption, are already in course of partial solution, and this result is due in no small degree to the experience gained and the administrative machinery perfected by monopolists in the pursuit of their nefarious ends. By the tribute which their admirable organisation enables these vultures to exact from the muddled millions on whom they prey, a clear proof is afforded of the possibility of regulating, for the benefit of all, those wider social relations that centre in the state. The standing objection to every socialistic scheme has been the denial of such a possibility ; and since, for want of evidence, that objection has hitherto been deemed unanswerable, socialism, as an economic creed, has always fared badly at the hands of political writers. At the present day, some of the bolder speculations of socialist writers are being quietly translated into practice by statesmen representing the most diverse schools of political thought ; and even semi-absolutist governments like that of the German Empire, where "social democrats," as a political party, are persecuted with a relentless severity that will be satisfied with nothing short of extermination, State Socialism is being evolved in a variety of unfamiliar but possibly useful forms. Whether we like it or not, it is evident on all hands that the framework of a wholly novel disposition of social conditions is being pieced together, bit by bit, and that it will depend on the lessons in moral endurance and mutual forbearance that have been learned during the past eighteen centuries, whether the change, when it does come, shall be peaceful, or whether it is to burst on the world in a tempest of fire and blood.

Maryborough Chronicle, Wide Bay and Burnett Advertiser (Qld. ),  1889,http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article146667720