wo hearts that beat as one."

III

The _Communist Manifesto_ is the first declaration of an International
Workingmen's Party. Its fine peroration is a call to the workers to
transcend the petty divisions of nationalism and sectarianism: "The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to
win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!" These concluding phrases of
the _Manifesto_ have become the shibboleths of millions. They are
repeated with fervor by the disinherited workers of all the lands. Even
in China, lately so rudely awakened from the slumbering peace of the
centuries, they are voiced by an ever increasing army of voices. No
sentences ever coined in the mint of human speech have held such magic
power over such large numbers of men and women of so many diverse races
and creeds. As a literary production, the _Manifesto_ bears the
unmistakable stamp of genius.

But it is not as literature that we are to consider the historic
document. Its importance for us lies, not in its form, but in its
fundamental principle. And the fundamental principle, the essence or
soul of the declaration, is contained in this pregnant summary by
Engels:--

"In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production
and exchange, and the _social organization necessarily following from
it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be
explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch_, that
consequently the whole history of mankind (since primitive tribal
society holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class
struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and
oppressed classes."[56]

Thus Engels summarizes the philosophy--as apart from the proposals of
immediate measures to constitute the political programme of the
party--of the _Manifesto_; the basis upon which the whole superstructure
of modern, scientific Socialist theory rests. This is the materialistic,
or economic, conception of history which distinguishes scientific
Socialism from all the Utopian Socialisms which preceded it. Socialism
is henceforth a theory of social evolution, not a scheme of
world-building; a spirit, not a thing. Thus, twelve years before the
appearance of "The Origin of Species," nearly twenty years after the
death of Lamarck, the authors of the _Communist Manifesto_ formulated a
great theory of social evolution as the basis of the mightiest
proletarian movement