far as to reject all other methods but that of
winning public opinion. Yet they are so dogmatic that success by this
method is for them, and for their principles as at present formulated,
utterly hopeless. While bemoaning the demoralisation of the lower
classes, they are blind to the element of progress in this dissolution of
the old social order, and refuse to acknowledge that the corruption
wrought by private interests and hypocrisy in the property-holding class
is much greater. They acknowledge no historic development, and wish to
place the nation in a state of Communism at once, overnight, not by the
unavoidable march of its political development up to the point at which
this transition becomes both possible and necessary. They understand, it
is true, why the working-man is resentful against the bourgeois, but
regard as unfruitful this class hatred, which is, after all, the only
moral incentive by which the worker can be brought nearer the goal. They
preach instead, a philanthropy and universal love far more unfruitful for
the present state of England. They acknowledge only a psychological
development, a development of man in the abstract, out of all relation to
the Past, whereas the whole world rests upon that Past, the individual
man included. Hence they are too abstract, too metaphysical, and
accomplish little. They are recruited in part from the working-class, of
which they have enlisted but a very small fraction representing, however,
its most educated and solid elements. In its present form, Socialism can
never become the common creed of the working-class; it must condescend to
return for a moment to the Chartist standpoint. But the true proletarian
Socialism having passed through Chartism, purified of its bourgeois
elements, assuming the form which it has already reached in the minds of
many Socialists and Chartist leaders (who are nearly all Socialists),
must, within a short time, play a weighty part in the history of the
development of the English people. English Socialism, the basis of which
is much more ample than that of the French, is behind it in theoretical
development, will have to recede for a moment to the French standpoint in
order to proceed beyond it later. Meanwhile the French, too, will
develop farther. English Socialism affords the most pronounced
expression of the prevailing absence of religion among the working-men,
an expression so pronounced indeed that the mass of the working-m