TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE FIRST OF MAY. THE dreaded First of May may be said to have passed off quietly everywhere. A few dynamite-cartridges and bombs were discovered in various cities of the Con- tinent; and in Liege the Anarchists, out of hatred to a Commandant of gendarmerie, wrecked the entrance-halls of two contiguous houses, and. out of hatred for the Church, destroyed a window full of ancient and irre- placeable stained glass ; but in all States Ministers of the Interior were keenly on the alert ; Commissioners of Police employed spies innumerable ; the huge garrisons of the great cities were under arms, artillery even being kept in readiness • and the Secret Societies, afraid of Laws of Public Safety under which their leaders might be transported en mane, passed the word to be orderly and quiet. There were, therefore, no outbreaks ; but except in London, where a huge gathering of sight- seers and working men amused themselves by listening to speeches in favour of shorter hours, the day cannot be said to have been one of enjoyment. Outside these islands, the well-to-do felt anxious, and the ill-to-do felt repressed. There is a general sense that the quiet of the day proved nothing, except that armed insurrection is impossible while the armies are loyal ; and in Paris especially there is even an impression, which has, we are struck to observe, quite captured the Times' correspondent, that the order maintained is of itself most ominous, as indicating that the disorderly have passed under the secret and stringent discipline of leaders who may at an unexpected moment give the order for attack. The view does not commend itself to us, as we have more faith in the instinct of the disorderly for disobedience, and believe that the quiet was rather a result of the fear enter- tained by the saner agitators lest society should be provoked into terrible measures of repression ; but its existence is by far the most noteworthy phenomenon of the May Day demonstrations. That Labour should have its fete-day is natural enough, and only shows a certain increase of consciousness on the part of labourers in the existence of common interests among them ; but why is Prosperity so anxious, suspicious, even angry, at the new development ? The answer is, that the well-to-do expect an "ugly rush," ending in some form, more or less violent, of redistribution ; but why do they expect it so timorously to-day more than heretofore ? Everybody sees clearly that the power of resistance in the hands of organised society never was so great ; that insur- rection has become, owing to the growth of Continental armies and the new methods of scientific warfare, only an anachronism. Nobody pretends that the workers, whatever their genuine grievances either as to pay or over-work, are worse off than they were ; while the enormous increase in their legal power, the new laws which give them either the direct control of Legislatures, or a preponderating weight in them, ought to have increased the disinclination to violence. The well-to-do of the Continent, however, reject these arguments, unanswerable as they seem, and betray a deepening conviction that the multitude is "dan- gerous," that it is in some way or other hostile, and that fear of its action is not only justifiable, but is a kind of duty with all wise and reasonable men. That is a most unhealthy condition of the educated mind, for its logical outcome would be a civil war between the different strata of society ; and no thoughtful observer can avoid the wish to ascertain, if possible, what its origin may be. It is not, we all know, an increase in the strength of the lowest class, or in its sufferings, or in its powerlessness to realise its wishes through peaceful and legalised action. Then what is it We cannot fully answer the question, any more than the statesmen who are pondering over it, sometimes, as in Prince Bismarck's case and M. Loubet's, with expressions which indicate despair ; but there is one great social sign which it is useful to record, and that is the increase in the general sense of popular pitilessness. It is not only that nobody expects the great corporation of the poor to be Christian, though that is of itself a most noteworthy fact, but that nobody expects it to be philanthropic. A kind of fever of philanthropy is raging in all other classes, from the Sovereigns downwards ; pain itself is condemned as evil, even when lawfully inflicted for good ends; and any report of " suffering," even among the moat degraded, rouses all Europe to protest. An eviction is denounced as an oppression, and that a capitalist should under- pay his employes, is regarded as tyranny little inferior in moral delinquency to deliberate murder. Kindliness is declared to be the highest virtue, and is demanded of all men, except, indeed, of the immense majority. They are expected to be pitilessly selfish. If they have the power, it is believed they will ruin the rich, evict all landlords without compensation, and destroy all visible property, merely because to those who have none, property is offensive. Nobody even imagines that a multitude might be unwilling to rob ; that employes would spare an em- ployer's wealth ; that those below would hesitate to inflict on those above all the miseries for which those above now feel and express such pity. Mercy, in fact, is im- plicitly denied to be a quality of the poor. Moreover, and this is more wonderful still, not only is the new power not expected to be pitiful or even just, but its pitilessness is not attributed to it as discreditable. No popular orator urges the multitude to mercy, no Socialist leader sets before them benevolence to the rich as an ideal, no agitator urges on behalf of the well-to-do the claim of a common brotherhood. Humanity is held to mean the poor, and while no sentence is severe enough for the man who plunders a savings-bank, no sentence is too light for the employe who only empties his master's till. The small corporations, City Guilds for example, are adjured every day to think of the misery of poor folk; but no one sets before strikers the misery they often inflict upon the rich. Not only is the Gospel of Christ not pressed upon the poor, but the gospel of Rousseau. is carefully, when the rich are concerned, withdrawn from their consideration. They are expected as wise men to make selfishness their only law, to press all just claims to the uttermost farthing, and to take every- thing they can get, without a thought of acknowledgment- If mine-lessees reduce wages, that is oppression ; but if miners destroy profits, that is only a doubtful though very natural exercise of a right. The doctrine of brother- hood having been employed against every variety of old tyrant, is withdrawn from the cognisance of the new one, as almost too inept for his consideration. The orator who shows Socialists that they will ruin themselves, is cheered by a part of society as a wise man ; but the orator who adjured them to have pity for innocent masters, would be treated, and that by very excellent people, as a feeble fanatic.
The consciousness that this is so, that the spirit of mercy has not yet developed itself in the corporation of the poor, is at least one great cause of the undue terror manifested, all over the Continent by all who have any- thing to lose. They are face to face, they think, with a power at once pitiless and pagan, and they shrink before its movements because they expect, if those movements are uncontrolled, some extremity of torture. Nobody faces an avalanche. The Anarchists are regarded as exemplars of what the people would be if let loose, and society prepares to defend itself against the ugly rush precisely as it would against a foreign invasion, and with precisely the same weapon of force scientifi- cally organised, and used without regard to anything but success. It is a bad position of affairs, and one which, in our judgment, has little that is real for its basis. Christianity is not dead, nor likely to die, and burning the capitalists as adherents of false economics, will no more make converts than burning the preachers, as the adherents of false creeds, did. The social impulse which created States and peoples is as active as ever, and will, in spite of wars and insurrections, keep the classes of any people fairly bound together. The cry of rage and hatred which produced the French Terror came from the People but so did the cry of pity, which, with no consent from Tallien and his colleagues, brought the Terror summarily to an end. There is no King Multitude or Arch-Rebel Multitude ready to tread without compunction on the faces of all it has overthrown, but only a multitude of individuals a little inclined to blindness, and purposeless rushes, and hoarse laughter, but with as many separate ideas in it, and grades of passion, and desires for itself, as there are hearts in it, or heads. It wants shorter hours just now, and by- and-by it will get them, and probably better wages too, where they are too low, not by law, still less by violence, but by the operation of a new social feeling, an etiquette if you like to call it so, which will make men reluctant to demand or to endure over-work, or a rate of pay which is not a livelihood. No century is ever without some sort of jacquerie, but nobody ever heard of a jacquerie which, unsolidifiel by legislation—that is, by the consent of the ruling majority—succeeded. The nnwisdom of the multitude may be justly dreaded ; we cer- tainly dread it ourselves, for there are points, like Free-trade, upon which experience teaches nothing, and reason seems powerless to enlighten ; but its fury is an accidental and passing phenomenon which will produce only isolated miseries. Anarchism by its very nature can produce nothing, and will be only a temporary social or local horror, like piracy or the strange epidemic of rick- burning which once broke out in our own midst ; and Socialism will end in new experiments in combination, and perhaps a further sacrifice made by the strong for the benefit of the weak. We utterly deprecate the mad bitterness which all over the Continent, and even here, is springing up between classes, and which is as bad when it infects the educated as when it poisons the impulses of the mass. Both have to keep their heads, and learn charity, if civilisation is to continue ; and bad as some of the signs are, if we may trust all modern history, they will. We understand the spasm of feeling which the recent outbreak of Anarchism has produced, but Europe is not going to end its struggle of centuries towards the light in the cataclysm of a social war. It is the fear above and the bitterness below, which alone make the Fete of Labour formidable ; and they are both only phenomena of the hour.
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