permitted to grow up before Russian Socialism can be really a practical subject for discussion in the German or French sense. The conspiracy is interesting on account of its determination and secrecy; the whole condition of Russia also is well worthy of study, but it is quite possible that the political, financial, and social anarchy there may after all work itself out for the time by disruption of the empire or foreign war. The idea of the corrupt and barbarous Slavonic power as a civilising agency is of course a grotesque paradox.3

What, however, renders the situation in regard to all countries more hazardous than would otherwise be the case, is that remarkable facility of communication which has been the growth of the present generation. Railroads, telegraphs, cheap newspapers, may all be said to date for the Continent since 1848. As we see, excitement is now in the air. It is felt and communicates itself to vast masses of men without any apparent reason. A wave of political, social, financial disturbance passes from one great centre to another now as it never did before. And those who are concerned in Socialist manœuvres are specially ready to take advantage of this. The two great centres of agitation are Geneva and London. There the exiled speedily come together. The Socialist from Germany, the Communist from France, the Nihilist from Russia, each betakes himself at first to his solitary garret; but all soon get known to one another, suggest ideas for common action, and keep one another informed as to the progress made in each country towards the common goal. Thus has been re-formed an International Organisation more formidable than that which fell into discredit by its participation in the Paris Commune. In this way the advance can be observed all along the line. If baffled in Germany, it is making head in France; if in France men's minds turn from the new ideas, Austria or Italy affords encouragement. And thus poor men bound together by an enthusiasm for what is little more than an abstraction, resolve to carry out that programme which to most of us Englishmen seems a very midsummer madness, of elevating the whole race of civilised men by a complete change of the conditions in which man has yet been civilised. They resolve, I say, and when they see an opportunity they mean to execute. The condition of Europe may favour their plans.

But now comes what is perhaps the most remarkable feature in the whole of this Continental movement. Much has been said from time to time of the power of Jews in modern society. Lord Beaconsfield, always proud of his race, has pointed out their superiority in many directions, and all would admit that in money-getting and in music they are in some sort inspired. But the influence of Jews at

The increasing famine in Russia must play into the hands of the revolutionary party. Hunger is ever the best insurrectionist, and unless the Government acts more wisely than at present the peasantry will become disaffected.

the present time is more noticeable than ever. That they are at the head of European capitalists, we are all well aware. The fact that during a long period they were absolutely driven into money-dealing as their sole business, seems to have developed an hereditary faculty of accumulation which, money being the power it now is, gives influence in every direction. In politics many Jews are in the front rank. The press in more than one European capital is almost wholly in their hands. The Rothschilds are but the leading name among a whole series of capitalists, which includes the great monetary chiefs of Berlin and Amsterdam, Paris and Frankfort. They have forced their way into the nobility of every country, and in all the vast financial schemes of recent years the hand of the Jews has been felt both for good and evil. That their excessive wealth, used as it has been, acts as a solvent influence in modern society, cannot be questioned. The barriers of religion and caste prejudice melt away before it. But whilst on the one hand the Jews are thus beyond dispute the leaders of the plutocracy of Europe, holding in large as well as in small matters, in the great centres as well as in the villages of Russia and Roumania, the power of the purse, another section of the same race form the leaders of that revolutionary propaganda which is making way against that very capitalist class represented by their own fellow-Jews. Jews-more than any other men-have held forth against those who make their living not by producing value, but by trading on the differences of value; they at this moment are acting as the leaders in the revolutionary movement which I have endeavoured to trace. Surely we have here a very strange phenomenon. Whilst the hatred against one section of Jews is growing in Germany, Russia, Roumania, and indeed all through Eastern Europe, to such an extent that they are persistently persecuted, and the question even in educated Germany threatens to become a political danger, the more the others, remaining poor and trusting only to their brains for influence, are gaining ground on the side of the people. In America we may note a similar state of things; the dislike of the rich Jews is increasing among all the well-to-do classes, whilst the revolutionary Jew from Germany and France has been at work among the artisan class in the great cities. Those, therefore, who are accustomed to look upon all Jews as essentially practical and conservative, as certain, too, to enlist on the side of the prevailing social system, will be obliged to reconsider their conclusions. But the whole subject of the bad and good effects of Jewish influence on European social conditions is worthy of a more thorough investigation than can be undertaken here. Enough, that in the period we are approaching not the slightest influence on the side of revolution will be that of the Jew.

The position of Great Britain and her colonies, as well as the United States, differs from that of European countries inasmuch as

the Anglo-Saxon communities have long had nearly all that the people of the Continent of Europe are still striving for. Rights of public meeting, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, the fullest possible personal liberty-these have long been secured, and men of our race have so far been able to work out political problems without that dangerous excitement which has attended the endeavour to solve them elsewhere. It is the general belief that this steady progress will contínue in England, and that although the social arrangements of English life may be greatly modified in time to come, yet that here, at least, we shall be able to satisfy the legitimate claims of the many without trenching upon the rights or the privileges of the few. But Communism in the sense of State and Municipal management is making head continuously, even in the sense of genuine Commurism -that the well-to-do should provide for the poor certain advantages whether they like to do so or not. That competition is being given up as a principle in favour of organisation for the common benefit, is at any rate quite clear. The postal and telegraph arrangements are entirely under State management already, and sooner or later railways will fall under the same control. In municipalities the provision of gas and water, like the arrangements for street paving, sewers, or the removal of nuisances, is conducted more and more by the directly appointed agents of the towns themselves. For the principle of limited monopoly and regulated competition, we are steadily substituting State and municipal organisation and control. That the poor law is distinctly communistic has long been urged, and indeed it is difficult to see how any system could be more completely so in intention than that which puts it in the power of an able-bodied man to live upon the earnings or savings of others, because he has been unlucky or lazy himself. The argument that no man must be allowed to starve itself leads directly to Communism if strictly applied. But of course the free-school system, where it exists, is a still further step in this direction. Not only do ratepayers provide a good education for those who could not afford it themselves, but they give their poorer neighbours the advantage that their children, educated at the expense of the well-to-do, shall enter into competition in the battle of life with the children of those who have found the means to pay for their schooling. The Artisans Dwellings Act was a smaller step in the same direction; and the proposal not long since made that children should be fed in the Board schools at the of the ratepayers was Communism pure and simple. Thus whilst we are arguing about Communism, and in some directions upholding the old idea that competition, not State management, must be the rule, we ourselves are slowly advancing, without perhaps observing it, towards the system which when proposed in all its bluntness we denounce as a chimera under the present circumstances of mankind. Poor-law relief and the School-Board education are communistic in principle.

expense

The Post-Office telegraphs and municipal management of gas and water involve the principle of the State or Commune's control. Does not this, even in sober England, show the tendency of the time?

In our colonies we see this carried still further. In Victoria there is the most complete State control. Post, telegraphs, railways, public works, education, Crown lands, each and all are managed by bureaux, and there is no tendency whatever towards getting rid of this responsibility. In New Zealand the method is carried still further. There also the whole of these departments are carried on under State management, and besides the community is taxed in order to provide free or assisted passages for emigrants from England who cannot pay for themselves. Then comes a time of pressure such as has lately been seen, and the State has to provide what is to all intents and purposes national employment for the people thrown out of work. What is this again but the gradual establishment of a communistic method? Granted that assisted emigration bas proved -as it has-successful when coupled with State works at which the emigrants are employed, we still have here the arrangement for which, in another field, the apostles of the new Socialism contend. The same reasoning applies to the municipal borrowing arrangements which are used in the general interest.

All this, however, merely shows that much is going on of a communistic tendency without being observed: the graver features in our home life, those which might under conceivable conditions lead to a struggle between classes on the rights connected with property, are far more worthy of consideration at the present time. My friends, Mr. Kebbel and Mr. Traill, have ably pointed out, in recent numbers of this Review, the serious political dangers which arise from the wide gulf between the upper and the lower classes, how the vote of the ignorant many is now the ultimate court of appeal, and how essential it is from their Conservative point of view that the aristocratic and the wealthy, the intellectual and the refined, should try to recover their waning influence by a closer connection with, and knowledge of, the people. Hitherto there has been nothing more noticeable in English society than the noble bearing of the people even under the greatest pressure. The Lancashire Cotton Famine, the late period of prolonged stagnation of trade, passed over with little or no disturbance. No other country in the world could in all probability have supported such a strain as the former without grave internal trouble. Men recognised the inevitable, and made up their minds to bear with it, at the same time that the well-to-do endeavoured to alleviate the distress. Nor is there in England that envy of wealth which is to be found elsewhere. If grand equipages or well-mounted horsemen were to pass through many parts of Paris or Berlin, they would scarcely escape without insult or probably injury. In London or most of our other great cities, there is not this feeling of hatred

against the display of riches. The leaders of Continental Socialism themselves admit that they have made little way in England. Our long political history has not passed for nothing. The working classes, it is true, feel their own power more and more; but so long as they think they can see their way to what they want through constitutional means, they have no mind to try the subversionary doctrines of the Continental agitators.

A continuance of this attitude nevertheless depends entirely upon the amount of consideration which they receive. Let any one look at the state of society in some of the great northern towns, and, leaving the misery of London aside, he will see that here are all the elements of the fiercest and, under certain conditions, of the most uncontrollable democracy the world has ever seen. For it may almost be said that there is no middle class to break the force of the collision between the capitalist and those whom he employs. This vast population of workers has grown up within the last fifty years. There is the employer, who for the most part lives out of the city, there are the mean dwellings inhabited by the hands, and the great factories in which they spend their lives. But all depends upon one or two trades: there is but little actually saved by the mass of workers, and, as certain indications have shown, the spirit of turbulence might again be awakened. When we reflect for a moment upon the disproportion of numbers, can we fail to be struck with the danger that might come upon all if some eloquent, fervent enthusiast, stirred by the injustices and inequalities around him, were to appeal to the multitude to redress their social wrongs by violence? When we hear or read of the organisation of the rich, how is it that it so seldom occurs to us that the real capacity for organisation may lie below, that the hand-to-mouth labourer has little to lose, and may even think he has much to gain by a change in the conditions of his daily existence. The hope for the future. lies in the fact that the rich are slowly beginning to perceive here both their dangers and their duties, and to understand that the privilege of possession now accorded to them by the consent of the majority, can only be retained by entering more fully into the daily life of the people, and remedying those mischiefs which are to be noted on every side. Those who best know the dangerous quarters of our great cities know well that there is a vast unruly mass of blackguardism which would take advantage of any break above to sweep away all barriers. Many theories are even now systematically discussed by the educated artisans which would savour of Communism to the upper class. But fortunately they are discussed, and therein is to a great extent safety. The large blocks of city property concentrated in the hands of individuals; the entire exclusion of the poor man from the possession of land; the manner in which in municipal arrangements the poorer quarters are sacrificed to the rich;