ory here in question should ever be really acted on, all society would be reduced to chaos, and all connection between action and motive, and the consequences of action, would be destroyed. Human personality itself would be expunged from the categories of existence.

Here, little as Socialistic thinkers may realize the fact, we have simply the old paradox, familiar to philoso phers ever since philosophy began, which denies that the many can co-exist with the One, and reduces all change, all action, all seemingly separate existences, to manifestations of a single principle. Of this philosophy, as bearing on human affairs, it is enough to say that, however flawless may be the arguments by which speculative sages defend it, not one of them has ever acted on it for a single day of his life, and any community which consistently acted on it for a month would at the end of the month be stark mad or dead.

Such, stated broadly, has been the history of Socialism as an intellectual movement. Its leaders, in moving away from a principle which is applicable to certain real, though remote conditions of society, have landed themselves in a theory which has no practical application to any possible constitution of human affairs whatever. The only alternative which they have been able to devise or discover for the absurd proposition that in the productive process of to-day ordinary handlabor, or the ordinary hand-laborer, does everything, consists of the proposition, which is more absurd still, that nobody does, and that nobody produces anything-or to make a long matter short, that nobody is anybody.

What, then, is the moral to be drawn from this curious intellectual denouement? It is not that Socialists, in respect of their natural capacities, are less capable than most people of reason

ing in a reasonable way. It is that the sole distinctive objects of Socialism are objects which are, in the nature of things, impossible, like the squaring of the circle, or the construetion of a perpetual motion, and that these objects cannot be presented as possible, except by a train of reasoning which is in itself fundamentally fallacious.

The History of Socialism regarded as a Constructive Scheme.

And now from Socialism as a theory, let us turn to its practical programme. The history of this we shall find to have been essentially similar. We shall find that the essence of its practical scheme at starting having been the destruction of certain existing conditions (e.g. the control of the laborer by the employer). its exponents have been brought back by the necessity of formulating the conditions which are to replace these, to a scheme in which the old conditions are in all their essentials reconstructed -changed in name, but with every feature sharpened, which Socialism promised and set out to obliterate.

Let us consider briefly what the principal of these features are. The majority, Socialists say, under the modern system of capitalism have no wealth-producing property of any sort or kind. They are, therefore, not independent. Further, the incomes on which they live, instead of coming to them directly from the sale of their own personal products, come to them in the form of wages, paid to them by dictatorial employers. Hence, to say that the majority are not independent is a very insufficient description of them. They are virtually, though not nominally, slaves; for the wage-system is merely slavery under another name. Socialism promises to raise all of them to the status of proprietors; it promises that the wage-system shall be root and branch abolished; and that every man, in virtue of his manhood, shall en

joy economic freedom. The only scheme of reasoned Socialism which has ever been seriously suggested, is one under which all the means of material production and distribution (such as land, machinery, warehouses, shops, shipping, and railways) shall be owned by some central body, commonly called the State, on behalf of, and as representing, the nation, and be used by the State for the benefit of all alike.

Now from the point of view of these average workers, who must constitute in any case the great bulk of the community, and who at present live by selling their labor for wages, what change would be effected in their present condition by a universal diffusion of property in the sense that has just been indicated? What would the possession of property in this sense mean for them? And would the conditions under which they received their incomes differ from what is now denounced as the system of "wage-slavery"?

The advantages which property at present confers on the possessors of it, are all or any of the following: (1) The means of living, not necessarily in idleness, but without the performance of work which brings any material gain. This is what is commonly called the possession of "an independent income." (2) The freedom to save by way of ordinary investment, a portion of present income with a view to its subsequent augmentation. (3) The freedom, on the part of any active and capable man, to use such savings, or his whole original capital, in work performed or else controlled by himself, and to enjoy himself the full results of his enterprise. Such is the case when a peasant owns the land he cultivates, or when an inventor devotes all his capital to the realization of a new invention.

But were property distributed in the manner proposed by Socialism, every

one of these advantages would disappear. If a man has an income of £500 resulting from shares in the London and North Western Railway, he can live on it without the performance of any corresponding work; but if all the capital of the Company were owned in equal portions by the employees, these men, unless they worked as they do now, would not receive any income at all. Nor could any of them alter this result in their own favor by devoting any parts of their incomes to the formation of fresh capital, or the acquisition of larger shares of the old. Were this allowed, as has often been pointed out, the régime of private capitalism would at once be set on foot again. Lastly, it is equally obvious-and this is still more important-that no personal property in the means of production and distribution could exist, which would enable any worker to use them according to his own judgment, or at all events to derivę any special profit from his use of them.

So much, then, for the promised diffusion of property. Let us now consider the promised abolition of the wage-system, and the establishment of that vague something which is called "economic freedom." It must be sufficiently obvious from what has been said already that Socialism, instead of abolishing that system, would perpetuate it and make it universal. Since nobody would receive his income in the form of his own immediate products, or the usufruct of the land or the implements of production used by him, he could receive it only from the national employer, namely, the State; and since it stands to reason that some work would be exacted from him in return for it, this income would be identical with wages as they are paid today. In what possible sense has a man more "economic freedom" if he works as an employee of a State railway than he has if he works as the

employee of a private capitalist? He has to perform the same technical work, and to perform it on what are essentially the same conditions; the only difference being, in the case of his failure to perform it, that whereas the private employer would do no more than get rid of him, the State, which could not get rid of him, would have to submit him to some form of penal discipline.

In summarizing the necessary results of concrete Socialism thus. I am not merely stating the conclusions which must force themselves on the logical intellect. An effect incomparably wider has been produced by the educative spectacle of State Socialism as realized in an increasing variety of ways. Of recent strikes many of the most violent and vindictive have been strikes either against the centralized State (as in the case of the Western Railway in France,) or against popularly elected bodies as managers of tramway services. Admissions are now frequent on the part of Socialist writers that Socialism, merely as Socialism, would be compatible with the most intolerable tyranny. One of the contributors to a well-known Socialist journal has lately declared that "life under State Socialism would be Hell, and that were Socialism established in England, every self-respecting Englishman ought to emigrate"; whilst in the latest English volume in sympathy with Socialist aspirations, the timehonored name of Socialism is explicitly discarded altogether.

This revolt has recently expressed itself by the substitution of what is now called Syndicalism for Socialism, as embodying the creed and scheme of the more active of the would-be revolutionaries; and the ideas by which this movement is animated are well worthy of consideration because, whilst constituting an attack on the fundamentals of all Socialism as a theory, the move

ment is directed towards objects professedly the same as those which amongst the masses have rendered Socialism popular.

Syndicalism as an Alternative to So

cialism.

The principles underlying the "Syndicalism" of the new Trade Unionist leaders may be best understood by an examination of their avowed objects in connection with the recent coalstrike, and the general ideas to which they gave utterance during the course of it. These ideas are summed up in the doctrine that in each industry all the implements and other capital employed should be the property of those who are engaged in it now as wage-earners; and that these persons should own and sell on their own behalf, the total products at prices fixed by themselves. Thus the leaders of the coal-strike in South Wales plainly declared that their policy was to use the strike as a means, not of remedying the grievances which were advanced as the immediate excuses for it, but of rendering the position of the employers altogether intolerable, and of so interfering with production that all profits would disappear, and the ownership of the mines thus pass to the men who would have proved that. unless they owned them, they could make the ownership valueless.

Now whilst this policy is, as will be pointed out presently, in one respect an embodiment of Socialism in its earliest theoretical form, it constitutes in another respect a fundamental and a violent repudiation of the main constructive idea of all forms of Socialism whatsoever. The essential principle of constructive or concrete Socialism is that no form of property essential to the business of production shall be the subject of any monopoly-that is to say of sectional ownership. But it is precisely such sectional ownership, that Syndicalism aims at perpetuating.

The prospect dangled before the colliers has been the ownership of the coal mines by themselves and the power that would thence accrue to them of “holding the rest of the community to ransom"-that is to say of outdoing the utmost feats of rapacity which even Marx ever imputed to the most rapacious of individual owners.

If the men who have entertained ideas like these as to coal-mines imagine themselves to be champions of the cause of Labor in general, they are not even consistent with themselves; for the moment their principles came to be applied generally, the whole of the advantages of Syndicalist ownership would disappear. So long as it was confined to one group of workers engaged in the production of one article of first necessity, such as coal, such workers, if their business did not collapse from within, might no doubt secure exceptional wealth at the expense of the rest of the community; but the moment other industries followed the same policy, the situation would completely change. If the implements and materials of bread-making were made the exclusive property of ploughmen, reapers, and millers, we should have a second syndicate which could hold the first to ransom just as effectively as the first could hold the second. If a third syndicate owned all the sources of water, the battle would become triangular and the end would be that each of the three parties would learn that the game of ransom, like the game of thrashing a man, is a game which is possible only when only one man can play it. Prices and earnings under Syndicalism, just as prices and earnings under the existing system,

The National Review.

are determined not by what the producers of any one class of goods demand, but by what the producers of other goods are generally willing to pay. Under any system of society the kind of equilibrium which thus naturally establishes itself would have to be protected from disturbance, or else positively regularized by the State. Under the existing system. the State protects it from disturbance. Under Socialism the State would regularize it by taking all businesses under its own control. Under either system, Syndi calism, as an instrument of ransom, would disappear, and, in fact, regarded as a constructive scheme, it differs from Socialism only in representing a frantic rejection of the one practical principle which renders Socialism a thinkable scheme at all.

On the other hand, whilst rejecting the most reasonable element in Socialism on its constructive side, Syndicalism, as an economic theory, represents a harking back to everything in the Socialism of the past which the educated Socialists of to-day have rejected as crude and obsolete. It is a harking back to the doctrine, together with those directly associated with it by Marx, that all wealth is the product of manual labor alone.

Such doctrines are like the stale dregs of beer which Socialists of the more thoughtful kind have left in their abandoned glasses; and with these dregs the new Trade Unionists fuddle themselves, and reel into the world mistaking inebriety for the illumination of knowledge, and advertise their condition by shouting that "they are going to stagger humanity."

W. H. Mallock.

The concern of Art is not to teach but to show impartially things good and evil-this is an accepted canon; and the one condition of good art is that the artist shows them as they seem to him, the deepest part of him: that is, he must be sincere. If he is busy pointing the moral at every turn he wrecks his art and baulks his purpose. The fact is that those ideas of good and evil, in whose vitality is the health of the world, are better nourished by examples drawn from the imaginative experience of men, than by the precepts of even the holiest, since these are, after all, only deductions, usually colored by prejudice, from the facts of experience; the source yields purer truth than the stream. The Wisest Teacher taught in parables which are the perfection of art. Writers of imagination have followed the sublime pattern; so that they have been Makers by intention, if Teachers by result.

In the drama this canon is especially prominent, and the moral result no less. "The Prodigal Son" is essentially a three-act drama, ending with the reassemblage of the actors in a happy consummation. And a play is a failure if it does not appeal to the heart. A serious play should have something of a volcanic effect, awakening men to the vast, subterraneous forces of the universe.

The plays here chosen for comment have both this non-morality of art along with this force of moral upheaval. The Tragedy of Nan by John Masefield is the most perfect of the two. It is a work of singular beauty and felicity of phrase; it has the austere nakedness which marks intense tragic utterance; and the dark sincerity of all great tragedy shines in it like star-light in a pool. The story is

of a rare, passionate, spiritual creature, maimed and crushed down by creatures of the earth, just as to Mr. Yeats the faëry world is crushed beneath the clods of an earthly civilization; or as Stephen the Martyr was crushed beneath the wayside stones. The beautiful and exceptional is crushed by the mean and commonplace, but, in its martyrdom, vindicates afresh the unconquerable holiness in man.

The sore besetments of her story, which, in spite of its remoteness, is real and natural, and her innocence, her wistful tenderness, her divine vision, give Nan a place among the great tragic women of our dramatic literature, with Desdemona and the Duchess of Malfi. She glories in her sex; her impulse is all a woman's to help and inspire a man and to mother the coming race-for unselfishness and for happiness through sacrifice.

"It be a proud thing to 'ave a beauty to raise love in a man," she says to her lover. And again: "It be wonderful to 'ave a father to do for. To think as he knowed 'ee when you were a little 'un. To think as perhaps 'e give up lots of things so's you might fare to be great in the world." It is this sense of redemptive forces, the subject of that universal strife which Mr. Yeats calls "the Quarrel of Galilee," that is the moving impulse of Nan's nature. Her heart is broken, not by persecution, not by the baseness of her lover, but by despair, at the callousness of people who are blind to the sense which is to her the single pearl of life.

The character of Dick Gurvil, her lover, is like a clouded mirror beside the clarity of hers. He is drawn with gusto, but without exaggeration. Dick is the type of the respectable man who lives solely for the body. His sense of merely physical beauty is sufficiently