Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/609

REVIEWS 587 chapter on 'The Progress and Present Position of Socialism,' he accordingly sets himself to trace the progress of this Revolutionary Democracy in the various European States, and in America and Australia, within the last few years. He naturally begins with Germany, 'the country in which Socialism has made the most remarkable and rapid advance.' The most marked feature of the recent Socialistic movement in Germany he considers to be its decidedly practical and even 'apparently temporizing' policy. He quotes the words of Liebknecht— ' Who can say what the .Zukunft Staat is to be? Who could foresee so much as the development of the existing German State for a single year ?' and he thinks that the view of the party is coming more and more to be that' the business of a living party is within the needs and within the lines of the living present.' He even ventures to predict as 'not unlikely' 'that the Socialist party, now that it is sufficiently powerful to do something in the legislature, but not sufficiently powerful to think of final social transformation, will occupy themselves much more completely with those miscellaneous social reforms in the immediate future; that they will thereby become every day better acquainted with the real conditions on which social improvement depends; that they will find more and more satisfying employment in the exercise of their power of securing palpable, practical benefits, than in agitating theoretical schemes; and, in short, that they will settle permanently into what they are for the present to some extent temporarily, a moderate labour party, working for the real remedy of real grievances by the means best adapted, under real conditions, national or political, for effecting the purpose.' If this prognostication is true (and it certainly seems to have some justification with regard to other countries as well as Germany), it may probably be taken to indicate two things; on the one hand, that the ideas of Socialism have become so widely diffused, and taken so powerful a hold of men's minds, that they naturally carry with then now some of that seriousness and moderation which belong to practical power; and, on the other hand, that many Socialists are becoming aware that their ideal is not to be taken as a universal panacea for social ills, but only as an indication of the direction in which it is desirable that social progress should move.

Mr. Rae's account of the progress of Socialism in the other European countries, and in the United States, is not less interesting than his account of German Socialism; but it does not seem necessary to call attention to any special points in it.

The five chapters that follow—on Ferdinand Lassalle, on Karl Marx, on the Federalism of Carl Marlo, on the Socialists of the Chair, and on the Christian Socialists- remain practically as the stood in the original edition, except in so far as certain additions have been necessary, in order to bring the information contained in them down to the present date. The following chapters that on