BOOKS.

REVOLUTIONARY DOCUMENTS.*

ALL students of politics and.social economies are Under a debt of gratitude to Mr. Postgate for giving them the book which is the main subject of this notice. The volume supplies ha with the chief documents of the Socialistic and Communistic sides of the revolutions that have taken place in Europe during the past 117 years. These inolude the great French Revolution, the Chartist Movement, the Revolutions of 1848, the first Internationale, the Commune, and the Russian Revolutions. Mr. Postgate not only helps us by giving •us under one cover documents which otherwise must be searched for in .many volumes, and sometimes in quite inaccessible places, but edits them in a very scholarly fashion. He occasionally shows his Communistic: opinions in his notes, but that dots not decrease but increases the value of the volume. It shows the nature of the apologia which is deliberately put forward by a man of brains and learning.

We are also grateful to Mr. Postgate for his plain speaking. He does not try to pretend that things are not what they ale or that consequences will not be what they Will be and what they are meant to be. He calls a spade a spade and man- slaying homicide without any camouflage. We know where we are with him and with his friends, and there is no pretence that a Communistic revolution will be a kind of chapel Sunday- sehool treat, with the elders in broadcloth frock coats, top hats, and black gloves long in the fingers, and their prim ladies in ,silk,where everybody hands round cake to everybody else, while doing and saying kind things, while at the same time, though all are promised perfect freedom to do what they like, they all instinctively do exactly as " Teadher says," and behave like little gentlemen and ladies ! Mr. Postgate knows better. He realizes that when the Communistic gods are athiret something very different happens. The inauguration of world happiness will be a blood-feast rather than a love-feast. There will be plenty of drilling and killing, and fire, famine,and slaughter. There will be dancing, no doubt, but it will not be of the " Here we go round the mulberry bush " type, but-a full- fledged orgy in which the blood of the vietims will be mingled with that of the revellers. The colour of the ballet will be -blood, and even if the love interest is Commtunatio, the • (1) Retalution from 1789 to 1008. By R. W. 11430/ate. Lohdon : • Grant mallards. [18s. net.]—(2) The Bolshevik Theory. Same Author and publisher. [7s. ed. net.] ccmmissaries will claim all the best girls as they inaugurate the new droits de seigneurs.

Of course, Mr. Postgate, being an Englishman, does not himself want this sort of thing. He cherishes the larger Revolu-

tionary hope, and genuinely believes that it will only be " just

while we are settling down, you know," that the red blood will flow. His very interesting book The Bolshevik Theory, already

noticed shortly in these columns, is quite optimistic on this point. Our business just now, however, is with the documents, and we will only once more express the great interest and satisfaction which his book has given us. It is one more proof of the value of an Oxford training. Though so keen a Bolshevik, Mr. Postgate has not forgotten the value of moderation in exposition, of putting the arguments on the other side fairly, and of meeting them fairly, and, above all, of not disfiguring his page with what for want of a better term we must call Tosh "—either the Tosh of humbug and(Wei% or the Tosh of the pirate who tries to frighten one by blacking his face and making his breath smell of sulphur. Mr. Postgate marshals his documents just as if he were writing about the war or the Insurrection of the Gracchi. We hope that his Bolshevik friends will be as grateful as we are. In that case, if the Com- munistic revolution tomes off, when his particular section of the party is ripe for execution, we hope, though we fear it is a faint hope, that the clearness and impartiality of his books will be accounted for righteousness, and win him a reprieve.

In our opinion, by far the most interesting thing in the book is the well-known Manifesto of the Communist Party, written by Marx and Engels, which was published in London in 1847.

What exact part Engels took in the matter is not actually known. But though it is generally considered as another Liddell and Scott mystery, we plump for Marx. If this view is correct, as we have little doubt it is, Marx was very much at his best in 1847, for his later productions, for example, Capitalism, tend

to be dull, dreary, and muddle-headed things. Capitalism is,

indeed, as nearly unreadable as anything can be which is by its nature fraught with an interest so tremendous. Marx by instinct and inclination had a great deal of the German professor in him, and no doubt he thought it was only seemly to be dull when the theme was great. In any case, there is no dullness about the Manifesto. It is on fire. It is very frank, and there are also traces of irony about it which are distinctly Hellenic in tone. In places, indeed, it reminds one of Plato, and still more of that supreme piece of political diabolism, the Melian Controversy in Thucydides. Whoever it was who gave its English garb to the Manifesto—possibly Marx himself— had a real sense of style.

The Manifesto begins excellently—" A spectre is haunting in Europe—the spectre of Communism." Marx proclaims that " the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," and he thinks that this has been " a warfare which has always ended either in a revolutionary transformation of the whole of society or in the common ruin of the contending classes." That, of course, can be proved to be an absolute mis- apprehension and misstatement of history. All the same it is a good " teeth-rattler," and this is what its author wanted

it to be. There has never been a real revolutionary transforma- tion of the whole of society, though of course there has been

common ruin of the contending classes. Revolutions of the kind Marx means, i.e., of the non-political sort, have always failed.

That is a pretty bad start for Marx's premises, and a start which, curiously enough, Mr. Postgate, to judge by the general

tone of his books, would have to admit as bad, i.e., contrary to the facts. The next premise is equally wrong. He declares that " All society is more and more splitting up into two opposing camps, into two great hostile classes : the bourgeoisie and the proletariat." We may say of this, as Gibbon said of one of the statements in regard to the persecutions set forth by the early Christian fathers : " This statement, though probable, is certainly false." Society is much less split up into the " haves " and " have note " than it was. The essential condition in regard to society in England, America, and in France, and indeed in all civilized countries, is that it is becoming more and more graded, and that the graduation tends to become less and less acute and more and more gentle. What was a series of very steep and difficult steps is becoming an exceedingly smooth incline. There may be the same distance from the very top to the very bottom, but the slope is extraordinarily easy. Two false Premises of this kind, when they are adopted by a man who. is a highly skilled logician as was Marx, are quite enough to produce before he has done with them the most huge, bloated, and preposterous superstructure that the wit of man can

imagine. That is the worst of logic. It is like building without well-levelled foundations. When you start your wall there seems by eye very little or nothing wrong with it, but when you have got it up some thirty or forty feet the out-of-trueness is

appalling. As Macaulay in his famous essay pointed out to

Mr. Gladstone, the then youthful hope of the Tory Party, nothing is so dangerous as accurate logio if you have not taken care to get your premises exactly right. If you are a bad logician, it is always possible that you may arrive at a just conclusion from wrong premises. If your logic is just and accu- rate, there is no possibility of your ever even blundering into sense. Your true logic based upon bad premises must inevitably lead you to the realms of intellectual earthquake and eclipse.

However, we do not propose here to meet Marx's arguments so much as to give one or two fine flowers, for so indeed they are,

of Marx's exposition. It is interesting to see, though he probably did not know much about them in the forties, how Marx borrowed from Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Young England party. Many of his expressions might have stepped right out of the works of these writers, or perhaps still more out of Sybil, Coningsby, or Tancred. The following passage shows that we have warrant for our words :- " The bourgeoisie, wherever it has conquered power, has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, and idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder all the many-coloured feudal bonds which united men to their ' natural superiors,' and has left no other tie twixt man and man but naked self-interest and callous cash payment. It has drowned religious ecstasy, chivalrous enthu- siasm, and middle class sentimentality in the ice-cold water of egotistical calculation. It has transformed personal worth into mere exchange value, and substituted for countless dearly bought chartered freedoms the one and only unconscionable freedom of Free Trade. It has, in one word, replaced an ex- ploitation veiled by religious and political illusions by exploita- tion open, unashamed, direct, and brutal."

Here is another Disraeli-like expression from Marx " The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the town."

One might imagine Mr. Postgate, who has still a bit of the don in him, setting this as the subject for an essay to Lenin or Trotsky with the comment : " Illustrate this from the policy followed by the dictatorship of the Proletariat at Moscow."

Very interesting and very important is the passage in the Manifesto about " over-production." We cannot, however, deal with it here except to say that it is another of those false premises which a pure logician like Marx accepts with all the gay ardour of a lover who would not dream of stooping to inquire whether it was nature or the cosmetic expert who produced the rosy cheek of the beloved. • Marx, it is curious to note, claims

that the Proletarians are not only the redeemers of the earth but the actual majority. Mr. Postgate, on the other hand, in his book The Bolshevik Theory has the candour and good

sense to admit that they are nothing of the kind, and to explain in effect that the most that can be said as to this claim is that the majority may possibly be drilled, coerced, and even slaughtered into being good Communists. It must, however, be a minority

job, and a very tough job too. This very positive con- tradiction is interesting and important. It is of course just possible that in Marx's day, i.e. 1847, the Proletarians in England,

that is the men who had little in their possession but their offspring, were in the majority. The said Proletarians. are now a very small minority of the population. The difference is due to the working of the abused capitalist system or, as it ought to be called, " the system of private property and free exchange." That system has never yet had a full chance, but in spite of the disabilities that have been applied to it by the protectionists, by the bureaucrats, by the Communists, and by revolutionaries and reactionaries generally, it has done, and is doing, immense

things to raise the general level of civilization. If it continues, it will enormously improve the material position of the workers

and proportionately spoil the position of the capitalist. Capital, by its accumulations, is always cutting its own throat, or apparently cutting its own throat, for capital, curiously enough, is contented and less inclined to be foolish and arbitrary when it is abundant than when it is scarce. The accumulation of capital gives Labour its opportunity.

Here we are incidentally led to touch upon another of Mars's fallacious premises. He never managed to arrive at a true defini- tion of " Capital," but again, like a true logician, took it on trust. Your logician hates definitions as much as does your practical man. But here we are bound to say that in this act of intel- lectual laziness or cynicism Marx has been well supported by the professors. One of the most crying wants in political economy is a good definition of the word " Capital." At present we use it in a dozen senses.

When Marx comes to what he would call close quarters with the institution of private property he is like a man bandying blows with an imaginary giant in a fog. He becomes intel- lectually ridiculous, though at the same time exceedingly interesting. After saying that Communists can condense their theory into one phrase, " Abolition of private property," he declares that " Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour." That of course is pure rubbish. Property is based upon the co-operation of capital and wage-labour, i.e., upon exchange, or, as Bastiat explained it, the " union of forces " between these two powers. However, Marx is certainly candid : " You reproach us because we would abolish your property. Precisely so ; that is our intention."

And now we must note a very interesting and significant passage in the Manifesto. For the last year or so the apologists of the Bolsheviks have been telling us that any report of the nationalization of women was a pure anti-revolutionary lie, and that nothing of the kind had ever existed or had ever been contem- plated, or could be contemplated, by such virtuous people as the Soviet or Proletarian Dictatorship at Moscow. We are bound to say that we were rather inclined to believe this, and to hold that the so-called proclamation of one of the provincial

Soviets proposing the nationalization of women was started by some insane Bolshevik bureaucrat and was never meant to be taken seriously. The following passage of the Communist Bible, i.e., the Manifesto of 1847, makes us think, however, that there, is something in the charge :- " But you Communists would introduce community of women, shrieks the whole bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to become common property, and naturally can only think that the lot of becoming common property will likewise fall to women. He never suspects that the real point aimed at is to do away with the position of women as mere instruments of production. For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous horror of our bourgeois at the community of women which he pretends will be officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women ; it has nearly always existed,. The members of our bourgeoisie, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of official prostitution, take special delight in mutually seducing each other's wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality community of wives. The Communists could at most be accused of wishing to replace a hypocritical and con- cealed community of women by an official and open community of women. For the rest, it is evident that with the abolition of the present system of production will disappear also the com- munity of women resulting from it, i.e., public prostitution."

At any rate, Marx's apologia is a very curious one. It is also one which most women will read with a sense of dread as well as of horror. They will demand something more satisfactory than to be told that history already condemns them to some form of Communistic possession.

In the final portion of the Manifesto, that which deals with Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism, there are some delightful examples of irony, as, for example, the remark :—

" Bourgeois socialism only attains adequate expression when it becomes a mere figure of rhetoric. Free trade—ui the interest of the working class ! Protection—in the interest of the working class Prison reform—in the interest of the working class ! That is the last and only serious word of bourgeois socialism. The socialism of the bourgeoisie is summed up in the phrase : the bourgeois is a bourgeois—in the interest of the working class."

The Manifesto ends with the following words :-

". The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of existing social conditions. Let the ruling crasses tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.—WORWRRS OF ALL LANDS, UNFFE ! "

We have marked dozens and dozens of passages for extract in this stimulating and interesting book, not only because they contain misrepresentations which can be beneficially exposed, but because they are incidentally full of excellent things. For example, we find Camille Desmoulins in The Old Cordslier declaring that Momoro and his friends were always saying to the revolutionaries what the Spanish priests said to Montezuma : "The gods are athirst. . . ." Poor Camille Desmoulins, in the -expectation of the guillotine, does not appear to. have verified his references. Another curiosity is to find the bloodstained

Hebert saying that the Feuillants demanded " the constitu- tion, the whole constitution, and nothing but the constitution."

Hitherto it has always been said that the, Spectator under Rintoul first used the phrase during the reform agitation of

1832. Yet another " origin " is worth noting. Mr. Postgate prints a very interesting insurrectionary leaflet seized by General Napier in 1839. It begins : " Dear brothers ! Now are the times to try men's souls ! " We were under the im- pression that it was Lowell, or Walt Whitman, or Lincoln himself who first used the words during the Civil War—unless, which is possible, Tom Paine was the originator.

We have only one cause of disappointment in Mr. Postgate's documents. He gives us the poignant and intensely interesting " The Song of the Lower Classes," by Ernest Jones— a splendid example of revolutionary verse. But he does not give us that wonderful song of the Chartists in which the life of the worker was compared to the Passion of Christ in words that bite into the live man's flesh for parchment. Again,

though we are sure that this was not through any desire to conceal the facts, but by accident, he does not illustrate a fact which he is always dwelling upon—the split between the Chartists and the Communists, by including tie Corn Law rhymer's epigram on a Communist (we quote from memory) :-

" What is a Communist 7 One who has yearnings For equal division of unequal earnings.

Blunderer, or pilferer, or worse, he is willing To put down his penny, and pocket my shilling."