surprises and fascinations of a race course. In 1892 Engels wrote that
the German Empire would in all probability be the scene of the first
great victory of the European proletariat. But thirteen years have
sufficed to bog the German movement in the swamps of Parliamentarianism.
Great Britain, whose Chartist movement was expected to provide the
British proletariat with a tradition, has furnished few examples of
skill in the management of proletarian politics, but existing society in
Great Britain has none the less been thoroughly undermined. The year
before that in which Herr Duehring made his statement of conversion, the
British Liberals had suffered a defeat which, in spite of an apparent
recuperation in 1880, proved the downfall of modern Liberalism in Great
Britain, and showed that the Liberal Party could no longer claim to be
the party of the working class. Not only that, but the British
philosophic outlook has become completely changed. The nonconformist
conscience grows less and less the final court of appeal in matters
political. A temporary but fierce attack of militant imperialism coupled
with the very general acceptance of an empiric collectivism has sufficed
to destroy old ideas and to make the road to victory easier for a
determined and relentless working class movement.

But if thirty years have worked wonders in Europe, and disintegration
can be plainly detected in the social fabric, the course of social and
political development in the United States has been still more
remarkable. In 1875 the country was still a farming community living
on the edge of a vast wilderness through which the railroad was just
beginning to open a path. Thirty years have been sufficient to convert
it into the greatest of manufacturing and commercial states. The
occupation of the public lands, the establishment of industry on an
hitherto undreamed of scale, the marvellous, almost overnight creation
of enormous cities, all these have resulted in the production of a
proletariat, cosmopolitan in its character, and with no traditions of
other than cash relations with the class which employs it. The purity
of the economic fact is unobscured. Hence a socialistic agitation has
arisen in the United States, the enthusiasm of which vies with that in
any of the European countries and the practical results of which bid
fair to be even more striking. This movement has arisen almost
spontaneously as the result of economic conditions. It is a