d for
bread and work. Pauperism spread like a plague. Each new invention threw
thousands of hand-workers out of employment. The law still branded as
conspiracy any united attempt of workingmen to raise wages or to shorten
the hours of work. At the very moment when the coming of steam power and
the use of modern machinery were piling up industrial fortunes undreamed
of before, destitution, pauperism and unemployment seemed more
widespread and more ominous than ever. In this rank atmosphere
germinated modern socialism. The writings of Marx and Engels and Louis
Blanc were inspired by what they saw about them.

From its very cradle socialism showed the double aspect which has
distinguished it ever since. To the minds of some it was the faith of
the insurrectionist, something to be achieved by force; "bourgeois"
society must be overthrown by force of arms; if open and fair fighting
was not possible against such great odds, it must be blown skyhigh with
gunpowder. Dynamite, by the good fortune of invention, came to the
revolutionary at the very moment when it was most wanted. To the men of
violence, socialism was the twin brother of anarchism, born at the same
time, advocating the same means and differing only as to the final end.

But to others, socialism was from the beginning, as it is to-day, a
creed of peace. It advocated the betterment of society not by violence
but by persuasion, by peaceful argument and the recognized rule of the
majority. It is true that the earlier socialists almost to a man
included, in the first passion of their denunciation, things not
necessarily within the compass of purely economic reform. As children of
misery they cried out against all human institutions. The bond of
marriage seemed an accursed thing, the mere slavery of women. The
family--the one institution in which the better side of human nature
shines with an undimmed light--was to them but an engine of class
oppression; the Christian churches merely the parasitic servants of the
tyrannous power of a plutocratic state. The whole history of human
civilization was denounced as an unredeemed record of the spoliation of
the weak by the strong. Even the domain of the philosopher was
needlessly invaded and all forms of speculative belief were rudely
thrown aside in favor of a wooden materialism as dogmatic as any of the
creeds or theories which it proposed to replace.

Thus seen, socialism appeared as the very antithesis of law and order,