XXVI. FASCIST PROTOTYPES
I
THE Fascist regime is a symbol of the hardening of the arteries of a social system which is losing completely its flexibility. Any sudden great effort and rush of rich warm blood can burst its blood vessels. Fascism thus has much in common with the political schemes with which the ruling classes of old tried to prevent the rise of a progressive capitalist system of society. Fascism in Germany and elsewhere turns back to the Middle ages.
In the thirteenth century, the morality of the merchant capitalists was beginning to challenge that of the aristocratic ruling classes. In reply the intellectuals, speaking for the feudalists of the time, did their best to denounce the immorality of these nascent capitalists. To the old landed order, finance, if not immoral, was at best sordid and disreputable. Merchants who tried to organize a ring to raise prices were considered monsters of iniquity and were placed in a pillory in the square with the approval of all Christians. Labor was considered the common lot of all mankind and the ideal was approved that one should eat only that which he produced.
The nobility of labor was one of the theses at the very base of the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. According to the Schoolmen, “The owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from the function which he performs and should lapse if he repudiates it. They are limited by his duty to the State; they are limited no less by the rights of his tenants against him…. He is, in short, not a rentier, but an officer, and it is for the Church to rebuke him when he sacrifices the duties of his charge to the greed of personal gain.” (*1)
Prior to the time that nascent capitalism had grown sufficiently to challenge the old order, morality and politics had been fused under the leadership of the Church. Later, as the struggle grew fiercely, the State took the lead and the Church became its arm. This, however, did not destroy the conception of a single society of which Church and State were different aspects, and of the necessity to fuse law and morals. In Queen Elizabeth’s day, in England, ecclesiastics were public officers; the Bishop was normally also the justice of the peace and relied on secular machinery to enforce not only religious conformity but Christian morality, because both were elements in a society in which secular and spiritual interests had not yet been disentangled completely from each other.
In their first successful struggles, by no means did the capitalists adopt a position of laissez faire individualism. Quite the contrary. They scrupulously maintained the theories of social responsibility and of mutual dependence of groups, each to be of service to the other. They insisted, too, on a complete authoritarianism of the State, just as they had previously supported the rise of an absolute monarchy. The business man tried to prove that only under his guidance would there be the greatest benefit to the whole. Under Calvin, the early capitalists established an iron collectivism, an almost military discipline to whose remorseless and violent rigors Geneva was subjected. As both the teaching of Calvin himself and the practice of some Calvinist communities suggest, the social ethics of Calvinism savored more of collectivist dictatorship than of individualism.
“In the plan for the reorganization of poor relief at Zurich, which was drafted by Zwingli in 1525, all mendicancy was strictly forbidden; travelers were to be relieved on condition that they left the town next day; provision was to be made for the sick and aged in special institutions; no inhabitant was to be entitled to relief who wore ornaments or luxurious clothes, who failed to attend church, or who played cards or was otherwise disreputable. The basis of his whole scheme was the duty of industry and the danger of relaxing the incentive to work.” (*2)
We might say in passing that the economic justification of these laws was the same as that which had led to the economic theory of mercantilism. The business of middle and northern Europe which had been embraced in the Hanseatic League was steadily deteriorating with the opening up ,of the New World and the shift of the trade routes to the Atlantic. The pressure of superior economic competition was reducing these towns to secondary positions. To prevent or, at worst, to control this competition, each town was forced to formulate a whole series of rules to the disadvantage of foreign merchants and travelers. (*3)
The views of Luther also called for an omnipotent and omnipresent State to which the church was to be entirely subordinate, although church and State were to be united. He furiously denounced the spirit of revolt then prevailing in Germany and demanded complete and absolute obedience to the rulers, or the princes. Against the Anabaptists he wrote: “Therefore strike, throttle, thrust, each man who can, secretly or openly—and bear in mind that there exists nothing more poisonous, more harmful, more devilish than a rebellious man.—As one must slaughter a mad dog…." (*4)
As with Calvin, so with Luther the State was an absolute authority because it was ordained by God and was God’s law. To Luther, the Prince was the father of the land; he was never weary of thundering at the masses that to honor was more imperative than to love, that the prime virtues were modesty, humility, reverence. Christian love was subordinate to reverence or the order of society. Luther, like Calvin, confidently believed that “even an individual of the worst character, one most unworthy of all honor, if invested with public authority receives that illustrious divine power which the Lord has, by His Word, devolved on the ministers of His Justice.” (*5)
In all this we see that early capitalism strove for power with an attitude of extreme conservatism. Neither Luther nor Calvin believed in free inquiry or toleration, and from their writings one may as easily reach fascism as individualism. The Reformation utilized the writings of these men, gradually reinterpreting them to build a philosophy of individualism. The business man no longer required theories of State control and social dependence; he needed just the opposite.
The early views of the Reformation were reflections of the prevailing Catholic opinion that the State was a holy institution and that the monarch ruled by divine law. He who opposed the State sinned against God. As the capitalists grew more powerful, however, they constructed gods violently opposed to the State of the old order; as they overthrew the ancien regime, the old aristocratic classes and Catholic apologists had to change their position also, since they were now, in turn, rebels. (*6) Theories of divine right and divine law therefore had to be modified; an objective science of political economy was created even among the reactionary elements. The chief exponents were Machiavelli and Hobbes.
In Italy, the feudal order had long since dissolved in the currents of Mediterranean trade, and large city States had been established under the control of the merchant princes. Here the ruling class acquired the greatest contempt for the Pope and the Catholic Church, which they controlled for their own purposes and whose mechanism they thoroughly understood. Machiavelli, for example, wrote, “We Italians then owe to the Church of Rome and to her priests our having become irreligious and bad; but we owe her a still greater debt, and one that will be the cause of our ruin, namely, that the Church has kept and still keeps our country divided.” (*7) Naturally, then, in Italy was enunciated most clearly the statist policy of making the Church secondary to the State, which was the chief goal of society.
To Machiavelli, the State was an end in itself whose excellence was to be tested solely by its ability to expand. The necessities of the State could brook no scruples in its leaders; he who brought morals into politics could only drag the State to disaster. Machiavelli thus took a completely unmoral point of view and was the first to separate ethics from politics. He observed the State with the eyes of an experienced, practical politician. Man was selfish. Materialist prosperity was the chief conscious basis of political life among men. The struggle for wealth resulted in a clash of interests between the wealthy and the people. The State was a product of this clash. It must be flexible enough to move with the changing relation of forces. To attain this lability the Prince who represented the State must use all means in his power. Everything was to be made subordinate to the stability of the State which should exploit even religious sentiment as an instrument of State policies.
The city-state, however, could remain stable only if it encouraged increased population of the city, established colonies in conquered territory, turned all booty into the treasury, carried on war actively rather than passively, and if the Prince looked to it that the State was rich and the individual poor, and took the utmost care to maintain a well-trained army. The Prince was to be feared, but not hated. He was to keep the people busy with great enterprises, encourage the useful arts, tax as lightly as possible, keep his hands off the property and women of his subjects, engage in a vigorous foreign policy. In this way he would be able to unite the people and to prevent the struggle of classes from destroying the State. These dictates of Machiavelli, Mussolini no doubt has learned by heart. (*8)
Particularly interesting was Machiavelli’s view that men of real distinction and marked ability are always regarded with suspicion by the masses. In times of peace and quiet they are wholly neglected in politics; the leadership falls into the hands of the rich and well-connected. An escape from the perils of such a tendency was found by Rome, he believed, in the policy of incessant war through which the best of her citizens were kept always to the front. (*9)
Machiavelli’s object in strengthening the State was not so much to prevent its overthrow—there was no fear of a capitalist revolution—but in order to secure the unification of Italy and the eradication of all rival powers. It was otherwise with Hobbes, who learned much from Machiavelli and who applied his knowledge to the entirely different situation in England, where the capitalists had beheaded the king, overthrown the old order, and established the hegemony of parliament, in the course of which they were adopting such theories of individual liberalism and utilitarianism as were expressed in Locke’s writings. Hobbes looked with dismay upon the gradual unfolding of the British civil wars in which the lower orders were gradually asserting their rights. He feared that these lower orders had been put down but temporarily, and that the Great Rebellion had begun the march towards complete anarchy and chaos.
Hobbes was convinced that the only way liberty could be secured was by the establishment of a complete and all-powerful State to which all individuals were to be entirely subordinate. Typical English product of the seventeenth century, Hobbes reached this conclusion, moreover, from the same basis as the Liberals; like Locke, he started from individualist, sensationalist premises and from the doctrines of natural law and social contract.
Individual man operated according to the pressure on his senses. He was completely egotistic and materialistic. In the beginning, before society was formed, each man fought against the other. “To this war of every man, against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power there is no law; where no law, no injustice.” (*10) The State rises with private property: “It is consequent also to the same condition, that there can be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man’s, that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it.” (*11)
Hobbes strictly separated natural right from natural law. The natural right of a man was the liberty each man possessed to use his own power as he willed for the preservation and advancement of himself. Natural law, like all law, meant restriction on right or liberty. When law was established, the liberty and power accruing to each man were transferred to the State. The State had arisen to create private property and, once the natural right and liberty of each individual was transferred to the State, all liberty and power belonged to it. This transfer was made by means of an unbreakable social contract of which, however, the sovereign or king was not a part.
In all this argumentative scaffolding, Hobbes carefully rejected theological disputations. The king did not rule by divine right, but only because he represented the State, which was the mechanism of power and liberty for all. (*12) The State undertook to guarantee that the original covenant was kept valid and did so by means of force. All law was essentially a command. Since the liberty of the individual was fused with the liberty of the State, fear and liberty or necessity and liberty were not incompatible terms. To insure obedience through fear of punishment was only another way to compel a man to be free. To sum up, Hobbes declared that the civil law was part of the law of nature; it restricted natural rights and transferred all of them to the State, with the exception of those which the State desired the individual to keep. This was the best way to guarantee the greatest good to the greatest number and to advance prosperity and liberty for all.
Civil laws, of course, must never be opposed to reason. The important factor was the reason of the sovereign, who was entrusted to make good laws. And by a “good law” Hobbes meant not a just law, for no law could be unjust, since justice was synonymous with law, but a law which was needful and for the good of the people. While it was true that subjects could not owe to the sovereign obedience in things contrary to the laws of God, only the sovereign was the authority as to what actually constituted the law of God.
Hobbes was not recognized by the deposed pretenders to the throne of England as their theoretician because he specifically denied the theory of rule by divine right, and placed the institution of royalty entirely upon rationalist and scientific grounds. It was only in the nineteenth century in England that Hobbes began to come into his own, when the bourgeoisie had need for theories of absolute control by the State. And indeed we may say, “In fact, Hobbes’ Leviathan represents what is called ‘the modern State.’ " (*13) To Hobbes, the chief end in social life was the creation of power. Power was the goal of the search for truth and the purpose of worship among men. Power was identical to liberty and was embodied in the State of which the chief feature was organized force for the good of all.
The seventeenth century produced not only Hobbes but also his political companion, Spinoza. Spinoza, too, believed that to be free one had to act in accordance with the laws of nature. Both God and man were controlled by immutable laws which compelled mankind to realize his union with nature. (*14) Thus, a study of metaphysics led Spinoza to the study of ethics and politics. In his ethics, Spinoza agreed with Hobbes that the good is that which we know to be beneficial to ourselves. Virtue means a development of well-being. One should love oneself and pursue one’s interests. Spinoza did not believe in humility, repentance, and pity, but held none the less that such traits properly could be propagandized by statesmen, so as to make the people docile, since “If the mob is not in fear, it threatens in its turn.” (*15)
In his political views Spinoza was in accord with Hobbes that property came into existence only with law, and he ridiculed the idea of inalienable and natural rights. States should recognize treaties only in their interests. Patriotism was the highest virtue; the safety of the State was the supreme consideration; might was the wisest criterion of right; not wisdom, but authority, made laws and the secular State in turn decided what was virtue. Like Machiavelli, Spinoza believed it proper to use religious rituals in behalf of the State, (*16) although he himself was a metaphysical pantheist.
During this period, when the bourgeoisie was engaged in revolutionary action to seize political power, a theory of popular sovereignty as against the absolute monarchy had arisen. We have already remarked that the anti-monarchical Hugenots and Catholics who wrote in the sixteenth century justified tyrannicide by theories of popular sovereignty. But to them, "people" did not mean the “mob,” but merely the magistrates controlled by the wealthy oppositionists.
Even when popular sovereignty was no longer so narrowly construed, such a concept was not necessarily incompatible with theories stressing action and the omnipotence of the State. This combination was particularly marked among the French. It is seen in the works of Jean Bodin, (*17) later in Rousseau and others. The idea of the supremacy of the general will of the people and the erection of a republican form of government was easily linked to the establishment of a dictatorial administration of the State.
2
As the evils of laissez faire became evident, new schools of authoritarian statism arose to protest against the havoc of free competition. These schools were often connected with the remnants of the aristocracy still pleading for the restoration of their power and criticizing the capitalist regime as compared to the past. Naturally, such authoritarians developed a strong tendency to romanticism which tinged all of their writings, whether literary or political. Their romanticism luxuriated in the early and middle parts of the nineteenth century, especially in England and Germany.
In England, the literary genius of this type was Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle waged a bitter struggle against the Philosophic Radicalism of Bentham, Mill, and others who expressed the intolerance of the self-made capitalists toward aristocratic special privilege and who were the spokesmen of the movement for parliamentary reform.
Carlyle did not hesitate to point out the evils of capitalism. He was extremely fearful of the probable results of the French Revolution and the riots that were spreading in England, especially during the Chartist movement. He noted the great and growing unemployment; he demanded a change from the Midas system and an end to the laissez faire anarchical and chaotic system that was reducing the English people to such misery. This was a line of approach, too, which was well adapted to the policies of the Tories and was used by that arch imperialist, Disraeli. In this period “Disraeli declared boldly that the Queen ruled in reality over ‘two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each others’ habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws … the Rich and the Poor."’ (*18)
Carlyle indomitably idealized the feudal past. The State must terminate laissez faire and organize industry. Repudiating the cash nexus in which men were but a means to an end, Carlyle urged the restoration of the dignity of man. Only through work could man be ennobled. A new chivalry of labor should be created. The foundation of the new era was to be a fair day’s wage and universal compulsory education. Against the ideal of free contract there was to be placed the reality of permanent employment.
Carlyle fought for dictatorship—Cromwell was his great idol—and for the rule of heroes who could achieve. (*19) Democracy could not bring out the worth of the individual, but could breed only revolution. Not the ballot for all, but an open career for the talented. This was the ideal of the future. In this he seemed to agree with Charles I, whose reported speech on the scaffold was: “for People are free under a Government not by being sharers in it, but by the due administration of the Laws." (*20)
Carlyle, however, had no intention of handing over the State to the old landlord class. Quite the contrary. The captains of industry must lead the way. “In the new order the captain will be a kind of servant, ready to do the greatest good to the greatest number, ambitious to be a just master rather than a rich master … . " (*21) “To reconcile Despotism with Freedom:—well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just.” (*22) Governments were to organize industrial regiments of the New Era, and the acknowledged king was to introduce wisely in all his territory a universal system of drill, not military only, but human in all kinds.
Without question the views of Carlyle could well be advocated by Adolph Hitler today, and that, should fascism develop in Great Britain, the ideology expressed by Carlyle will be a most important weapon in its hands.
Typically reactionary was Carlyle’s view that the system could be changed only by making men more moral, a condition which, in turn, could be effected only by mystical probing into the soul. “What is to be done? … By thee, for the present, almost nothing…. Thou shalt descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a soul there; till then there can be nothing done!” (*23) And he denounced the British business men for treating the soul as some Slavonic dialects do, as synonymous with the term “stomach.” Carlyle did not shrink from advocating the seizure of power by a determined and right-thinking minority whose actions would be thoroughly justified if the New Era were thereby inaugurated. (*24) Here, too, Carlyle shows himself a forerunner of the present fascist movement. In his advocacy of the need for a dictatorship of the scientists and the elite, Carlyle was only following Saint-Simon, whose influence he had strongly felt. (*25)
Carlyle’s philosophy could be summed up in the following doctrines: an aristocracy of talent and priesthood; the organization of labor and education through the establishment of order, responsibility, and regimentation; a gospel of work that would unite labor and religion; the connection of industrial sovereignty and aristocracy under the rulership of captains of industry; the establishment of a universal brotherhood. (*26)
The disciple of Carlyle was John Ruskin, who also announced that all must work under an aristocracy made up of landed proprietors, soldiers, captains of industry and professional classes similar to those of feudal times. The unfit were to be sterilized. A definite reaction was to be launched against the machine age; there must be built up again guilds and crafts and artistic quality in work. Work must be a joy. The State must force all to labor and must fix the incomes of the owners of land and captains of industry.
In literature, romantic Toryism flowered out in great style, as exemplified by such as Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. Of the last three, each had begun as pretended Jacobin sympathizers, but could not sanction the actions of the masses. From then on they turned their backs on Liberalism and agreed with Coleridge: “Only in a voluntary surrender of himself to a corporate society can man find that mystic repayment of desire that is at once an expansion and a limitation. Only in state and church can the anarchy of nature and the order of civilization be reconciled.” (*27) Coleridge was to surrender himself not to corporate society but to the mysticism of opium.
Similarly, Southey developed a Tory humanitarianism, advocating a national grant for education, a well-ordered plan of emigration, factory laws, child labor restriction, commutation of tithes, allotment of land to laborers, building up of a co-operative movement, etc.
With such crocodile tears the wealthy aristocratic groups of England wept for the poor while actually striving with might and main to maintain their special privileges. The Tories were anxious to show the evils of capitalism; they were equally concerned with proving the glorious wonders of former days, when they were in power.
These men of letters were seconded by the propaganda of various Christian and Catholic socialists in England. In England the violence of the Chartists, especially the extreme Left atheistic wing, had compelled the wealthy to take a grip on the situation in an effort to control it. Under the initiative of Maurice and Kingsley, a movement of Christian Socialism was organized in the middle of the nineteenth century, whose principal object was to defeat the Reds. In their opinion, the State should be conservative, but the church communistic. The increasing gap between the rich and the poor showed a lack of humanitarianism which must be terminated if England were to escape revolution. They contrasted their Christian Socialism with Left Wing Chartism as follows: the Reds wanted "all thine to be mine,” whereas the church declared “all that is mine is thine.” The Christian Socialists were to preach this church doctrine both to the rich and to the poor to apply the golden rule of Christ. (*28)
The creed of the Christian Socialists could be stated as follows: “On the one hand, association for work under the ideal of brotherliness, and on the other, the re-establishment of the social system-not on a new basis—but on the old. The change to present conditions had destroyed the relation of master and servant, of employer and employed; but the new order was to give the masters a principle of humanity, a true feeling of responsibility, which would make it impossible for them to take advantage of the labourers; while the workmen, under the new conditions of peace and prosperity, were to be filled with the joy of service.” (*29)
The Christian Socialist movement in England went through various phases. Its first phase closed in 1854 with the failure of the producers’ co-operative associations which the leaders had fostered. The spirit of the Christian Socialist movement was continued in the Working Men’s College that was founded through the clergy. In 1887 the Guild of St. Matthew was formed and in 1889 the Christian Social Union organized.
A reaction to French revolutionary Liberalism nowhere developed more than in Germany. The chief theoretician of the romantic school, hailing the past and insisting on the complete submergence of the individual in the State, was Hegel. According to Hegel, freedom consisted not in the absence of restraint but in self-determination to which restraint could be attached. The will of the individual was free only when fused with that of the State. The State is the true self into which the mere individual is absorbed. “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth.” (*30) This is the cornerstone of moral and political obligation. In other words, we are morally free when our actions conform to our real will. Our real will is the general will and the general will is most fully embedded in the State.
According to Hegel, “The state being the individual writ large, its own independence is the primary condition of its internal life and indeed of its freedom. And for this reason it imposes an absolute sacrifice on the individual when it is necessary to maintain it.” (*31) War was not something the State must fear; war was good when it led to discipline and moral soundness.
The struggle against the Napoleonic invasion and the humiliating Treaty of Tilsit permitted to appear patriots who glorified the State in order to mobilize the people under it to fight the French. This was the position of Fichte, who made it his business to attack the revolutionary anarchy of the laissez faire schools and who proposed instead a social and economic scheme for self-sufficient communities to be regulated by the State and in which every able-bodied person was to be organized according to occupation and would have a modest but assured income. (*32) Foreign trade was to be reserved solely to the State. Behind Fichte’s plans was the tradition of mercantilism so strongly prevailing in the Hanseatic States of Germany.
In the revolution of 1848, two distinct movements were attacking capitalist liberalism, namely, the agrarian aristocrats dominating the Prussian State and the German system, on the one hand, and the mass of laborers who had begun to organize themselves, on the other. At this stage there appeared intellectuals who tried to unite both these groups against the capitalists in favor of the State. While they were not able to make much headway with the factory workers who went towards the Marxists, these intellectuals were able, under the guidance of Karl Marlo (Professor Winkelblech), to ally themselves to the handicraftsman.
“Winkelblech would heal the ills of society, and improve the condition of the working classes, by the adoption of a compromise between liberalism and communism. Among his demands are collective property in land, side by side with private ownership, co-operative production, the handing over of means of communication to public bodies, and State participation in mining, forestry, fishing, and even trading and banking. But he would also restrict private undertakership and speculation whenever the interests of society require it, and he would grant to the labourer the right to work and to the incapable, adequate means of subsistence.” (*33) Marlo believed in the reconstitution of the guilds of old and the placing of obligation upon private property according to the old Christian Germanic law. His system he termed Federal Socialism.
During the 1848 events, the master handicraftsman who met in their Congress at Frankfort formulated Marlo’s program. This was also accepted by the journeymen who met separately and who practically agreed with their masters, although adding demands for suffrage, compulsory education, industrial schools, twelve-hour day, legal minimum wage, sickness insurance, progressive property and income tax, protective duty on wholly manufactured imports, partition of Crown lands and division among the land-workers and peasants. (*34) It is significant that, while the master handicraftsmen agreed with Marlo in attempting to return to the Middle Ages, the journeymen, accepting the reactionary theory, added wholly modern and progressive demands. The past of the journeymen was indeed with their masters; their future was to be with the proletariat.
3
The revolutions of 1848 brought the Catholic Church actively into the social scene. The clergy viewed with dismay the rise of large bodies of discontented workmen who were moving towards a militant atheism in the course of their struggle. If the church was to retain its hold upon these people it was absolutely necessary for it to enter into the social problem and to espouse the cause of the poor. In this way not only would the Catholic Church maintain its standing, but the cause of social order would be subserved.
The Catholics were all the more ready to join forces in the criticism against business since they had always regarded modern capitalism as coincident with the Reformation which had both deprived the Catholic Church of its property and brought forth poverty and misery in its trend. Thus a Catholic Socialism was born which attempted to link the ideals of socialism with the idylls of the church.
Such people took pains to prove that the early Christians were communists and that there are no dicta of Jesus to the effect that private property is holy. They pointed out, too, that when the church possessed a good part of the land of the Country, as in the ninth century, when half the soil of Italy was in its hands, or in the eleventh century in England and in Germany—the condition of the poor of those times was much better than when the church had lost her estates. (*35) They never ceased to expound the need for the termination of irresponsible liberalism and for the re-establishment of mutual duties and responsibilities.
In Germany, special conditions existed to enable the Catholics to attain a socialist position relatively early. In the first place, the Catholics there were a minority whose standing was by no means secure. Later, under the pressure of Bismarck, a regular kulturkamph of was to be inaugurated against them to wipe out their influence within the German nation. Secondly, the Catholics were strong in those sections where the discontent of 1848 had been manifest. The Church could not fail to be touched by the demands of its parishioners. Then, too, it believed that by attaching itself to the cause of the workers it would be able eventually to supplant Lutheranism and to regain Germany for itself. Thus it was that Monseignor Kettler of Mayence could agree heartily with the Lassallean movement, and write his book on the Labor Question and Christianity.
These actions of the Catholic Church, however, only infuriated the hardboiled Prussian reactionists who saw in the tactics of the Catholics not merely aid to the workers, but an attempt to mobilize the masses of the Catholic regions of Bavaria and the Southwest against Prussia, and to connect them with Catholic Austria. To Bismarck, the struggle against the Catholic Church was a struggle for German unity. After the defeat of Austria in 1866 it became plain to him that a vigorous war must be staged to drive the Catholics out of the country.
In the meantime, to entrench themselves further, a great many Catholic clergymen embraced Lassalle’s views, and in 1869, on the eve of their being driven into illegality, they met in convention and adopted a program for Catholic social societies. At Fulda, German bishops drafted a program which declared: “It is, therefore, necessary to come to the assistance of the working-classes: -1. By providing against misery and want. 2. By providing for the rooting out of vice. 3. By providing for the improvement of the moral and intellectual condition of the working-classes. 4. By organizing labour and wages so as to improve the workman’s condition (increase of wages in proportion to length of service, profit-sharing, etc.). 5. By encouraging the workman to love his home. 6. By favouring habits of thrift. 7. By promoting harmony among factory people. 8. By endeavoring to maintain cordial relations between workmen and employers. 9. By alternating industrial and agricultural labours. 10. By protecting the morals of working girls. 11. By rendering it possible for mothers of families and married women to attend to their domestic duties. 12. By promoting legislation in favor of the working-classes, hence: (a) prohibition of the labour of young children; (b) limitation of the work-hours of growing youths; (c) separation of men and women in workshops, factories, etc.; (d) forced closing of all unhealthy workshops; (e) limitation of the hours of labour; (f) assurance of the Sunday rest; (g) granting of indemnities to all workmen who, without any fault of their own, become temporarily or permanently unfit for work; (h) granting local guarantees to trades unions; (i) ensuring the observance of the social laws by means of energetic State control.” (*36)
For its inspiration, the German Catholic Socialist movement went back to the guilds of medieval times. At first it tried to organize mixed guilds of men and masters; when this failed, it organized workers only. During this period, however, its chief base was in the regions where the artisan and handicraftsman still prevailed and where their interests could be linked up nationally with the rich landowners rather than with the mass of workers in the industrial cities. Their ideal was expressed by Pope Leo XII’s Encyclical, namely, that “the corporations which would be set up under the aegis of religion would aim at making all their members contented with their lot, patient in toil and disposed to lead a tranquil, happy life."
The answer of the ruling class to the social Catholic action was to attempt to win the workers themselves through their own school of State Socialism. The forerunner of this movement was Rodbertus; the practical maneuverer was Bismarck. The theoretical work was continued by Wagner and Schmoller and the Socialists of the Chair.
Rodbertus, when he became State Minister of Education, was a product of the turmoil of 1848. He intimately consorted with both Lassaile and Bismarck, and succeeded in getting them to work together. His chief idea was that, since labor created all value, the State should participate in improving the system of distribution to enable the laborers to have more. He advocated a gradual nationalization of industries whereby each worker had recourse to a given distribution point where he could use “labor notes” instead of money. (*37) This was also his method to prevent revolution.
Rodbertus himself could make little impression among the workers since he enjoined them to retain capital and landownership, not to found trade unions or co-operative societies, nor to demand protective legislation. He was also opposed to the independent politics of the proletarian. (*38) What Rodbertus wanted above all was to consolidate the workers with the agrarian Junker elements against the big bourgeoisie; in this, he was able to win Lassalle partially to his side.
Bismarck proceeded from the premise that the State was a Christian institution and that mutual responsibilities existed between the citizens and the State. Social duties were imposed upon the citizens of the State. The function of the State was to insure the faithful discharge of these duties. In his early youth, Bismarck had advocated the formation anew of compulsory guilds as a remedy for overproduction. Later, in the last quarter of the century, he was able to help organize guilds for artisans. It should be borne in mind that only under the blows of the French Revolution in 1811 had guild privileges, together with other vestiges of serfdom, been abolished in Germany, and that even in 1848, guild remnants had played a role under the influence of Marlo.
With Bismarck, as with other Germans, what was omnipotent was not the nation nor the government or administration, but the State. This view of the Prussian ruling group can be understood readily when it is recalled into how many principalities Germany was broken up, how great was the pressure of foreign nations upon it, and how vital it was for the country’s progress to establish unity. “Upon the sender of a parcel from Koenigsberg to Metz it was incumbent to calculate the freight of this consignment according to the rates of nearly fifteen hundred different tariffs.” (*39)
It was no wonder that the German Liberals were unpopular with their theories of laissez faire. Bismarck was never in sympathy with them and rested the might of Germany not upon manufacture but upon agriculture and the land. This was the general view of the patricians in charge of Prussia at that time.
The theories of paternalism found their practical exponent in Bismarck, who adopted such an attitude towards the workers. In dealing with the socialists, Bismarck attempted the double policy of trying to terrorize them out of existence and of invalidating their claims by establishing a more or less complete system of social reforms designed to improve the lot of the workers without giving them the possibility of controlling the State while identifying their interests with the State rather than with either the revolutionists or the Catholics.
Soon Bismarck’s laws were rationalized by governmental theoreticians. These formed the school of State Socialists of the Chair, so called because it was composed predominantly of professors who held chairs in universities. The policy of these State Socialists was the enactment of a complete system of factory and general industrial laws, the creation of an adequate tariff system to protect the internal economy of Germany, the establishment of sufficient taxes to insure responsibility to social undertakings, the growth of State undertakings, especially railways, the formation of State monopolies, and an adequate colonial system.
“According to the State Socialists, all employers and workmen ought to be grouped into corporations. No one should be allowed to exercise a trade unless belonging to the corresponding guild, nor be admitted to a corporation previous to having undergone an examination to test his capacity; the admissions should never exceed the limits of number fixed by each body. The great industrial establishments should form themselves into district or national corporations, and all the guilds of the same trade …ought to unite so as to form national federations.
“And many State Socialists do not stop here. They would have the State to regulate not only production but even population; they maintain that legislation, besides placing a restriction on freedom in choice of residence, prohibiting all emigration from the rural districts and the rapid population of the large cities, should also put a check on marriage among proletarians.” (*40)
As can be seen, the State Socialism of these worthies was really a supplementation of private capitalism with a highly developed regimen of control blending into a system of state capitalism. These people, therefore, were collectivists rather than socialists. Except for vague expressions of such men as Rodbertus, who put forth utopian schemes of labor-notes, the philosophy of the German professors was merely one of complete expansion of State control to cover all the activities of modern social life. Very often it assumed an anti-Semitic character, as did also the platform of the Catholic Socialists, particularly in Austria and south Germany. In their anti-Semitic agitation, these collectivists warned that the internationalist Jewish Rothschild family possessed one-quarter of Bohemia, or a wealth seven times that of the imperial family. It was sinister that Jews controlled one-third of Hungary and were in charge of all the important banks. Ominous, too, were the holdings of more than a million and a half Jews who resided in Austria and who had a choking control of internal economic life. Such Catholic Socialists called on the State to wrest this control from the capitalist in general and from the Jew first of all.
With the failure of the anti-Catholic laws, Catholic Socialism became accepted in Germany as an extremely important aid to social control. The Prussian-German State was eager to make this alliance with the Catholics because of the extensive growth of the Marxist movement. This was a period of vigorous organization of Catholic trade unions in competition with the Marxists, the Catholics attempting to adopt to their own interests a number of labor theories. They advanced the opinion that their unions could gradually become organs of labor legislation and that the State would entrust them with the discharge of such functions because of their special qualities. They promised that all questions affecting the interests of a trade,—hours of labor, Sunday observance, apprenticeship, sanitary conditions of the workshops, the labor of women and children, and the rate of wages paid,—instead of being regulated as they then were by brutal, inflexible laws seldom adaptable to every individual case, should henceforth be settled by the union, and the rules of the union would be incumbent upon all the members of the trade or profession, both masters and men.
In France, the Social Catholic movement developed at the same time. At first the question had to be settled within the Catholic Church whether it should favor democracy or not, the affirmative being taken by De Tocqueville and Lamennais. Since the democratic struggles in the early days of the nineteenth century were associated with acts of revolution, the Pope in 1832 took occasion to write against this view, “denying that freedom of conscience and liberty of the press were unqualified rights, and reproving these who incited peoples to revolt against their princes.” (*41) This stand against democracy as a political instrument by the church was reinforced after the revolution of 1848 had culminated in the empire of Napoleon III, who strongly favored the Catholic Church. However, the democratic tendency more or less persisted, with the pioneers of the social Catholics maintaining five principles, namely: opposition to the Liberal ,economists, an appeal to Christian morals of charity, faith in labor organizations adapted to the guild system, minimum wage for all, and social legislation.
The position of French labor in those days can be gauged by the number of arrests that occurred for unionization. Between 1852 and 1860 no less than seven hundred and twenty-eight coalition cases came before the courts in which over three thousand and eight hundred men were punished. (*42) In 1864 the law regarding coalitions was modified but, even so, almost a thousand persons were arrested and nine hundred fined or jailed for strikes between 1864 and 1870. There also existed the infamous law of livret (passport or certificate), which had been in force during the eighteenth century and re-enforced under the First Consulate. Under this law, which was not abolished until 1890, “Employers were forbidden to engage a worker who did not produce the livret stating that he had discharged his debts and obligations toward his former master. It meant that workers who had fallen into debt with their former employers were chained to their jobs and that employers could take advantage of the workers’ situation to lower wages.” (*43)
After the Paris Commune, the Church, so as to become a counterweight to the socialists, was forced to change its position regarding democracy and the necessity of social reform. In 1872, workingmen’s clubs were started by Count Albert De Mun, which in 1884 had fifty thousand members and by 1900 had risen to sixty thousand. De Mun openly called himself a soldier of the “counter-revolution,” adopting the extremely menacing slogan, “Workers, you must Christians be!” (*44) When elected Deputy in parliament, De Mun took a position with the extreme Right.
From the very beginning, the social Catholic movement was linked up with monarchical ideals. The Third French Republic, in order to maintain its control over education and its political integrity, was forced in 1877-78 to engage in a sharp struggle against the Catholic clergy. The efforts of the social Catholic movement were therefore an attempt on the part of the church to obtain a mass base for a counter-attack against the republic. De Mun, claiming that the French Revolutionary Law of 1791 forbidding all association and all organization of labor was responsible for social disorder, constantly tried to make it appear as though the bourgeois republicans were breeders of revolution while the monarchy favored social reform. This view was abetted by the legitimist pretender to the throne, the Count de Chambord, who was distinctly aware of the value of a social program as a political asset, and who tried to portray the monarchy as the historic protector of the right to organize.
De Mun was strongly for the limitation of competition, for association of common interests, for imposing upon the emperor the duties of patronage, for the uplift of labor and the conditions of the laborer. Against Marxism, the social Catholics were active in promoting Catholic trade unionism and favorable legislation against child labor. (*45) They aimed at the protection of women from injurious industrial exploitation, the establishment of social insurance, and similar matters. In France, the social Catholics helped to enact the Law of 1884, which has been called the Charter of French Trade Unionism. Just as in Germany a Catholic or “Center Party” was organized, so the social Catholics in France were embodied in the "Action Liberale Populaire.”
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the social Catholic movement was able to claim considerable successes for its efforts, especially in building up affiliated unions. In Germany, the Catholic unions, with the aid of the State, had a membership of over a million, even after the war. In Italy, the Catholic Italian Federation of Workers also was of considerable size.
The principles of the Catholic union were very different than those of the free trade union movement. The latter was Marxist, and preached the need of class struggle. The Christian and Catholic trade unions believed that work was a joy. Classes were to be organized according to their occupations. Each class was to know its limitations and to have mutual responsibilities. The State must help the poor with reforms and must be charitable like the church. The slogan was “Live and let live.” The Catholic and Christian unions did not believe in the strike, but were an agency for class collaboration, advocating pacifist persuasion and religious non- resistance. By means of faith and prayer, both employer and worker, the lion and the lamb, could lie down side by side. Thus would the golden rule of “Peace on earth and good-will to men” be realized.
In Italy especially the Catholic unions were able to demonstrate their value to the employers in the struggle against revolution through the activity of the Italian Confederation of Workers. This organization was part of a general social Catholic network which derived its sanction from the well known encyclical Rerum Novarum ("On the Condition of Labor") of Pope Leo XIII, issued in 1891. This encyclical maintained the right of property, and consequently rejected socialism, but prescribed for the various social classes reciprocal duties, with the object of effectively and permanently harmonizing their relations. (*46)
The Catholic Church organized the syndicalist movement centered in the Italian Confederation of Workers, to which was affiliated the National Syndicates or Federations, and afterwards the Local Unions of Labor. All of these organizations differed from regular unions in that they rejected the principle of uncompromising struggle and recognized and utilized moral factors derived from Christianity. They advocated the effective sharing by the workers of the profits in the management and in the property of the undertaking.
“Following this principle, it has tended also to promote Parliamentary Reform, with the object of having in the Senate a technical organ elected by the occupational associations. Catholic Syndicalism further aimed at attaining internationalism which from the field of labour should extend to the political field through disarmament, international arbitration, etc.” (*47) This Catholic group of unions was closely connected with the Popular Party which arose in 1919 to fight the revolution, and was an extremely reactionary organization.
No sooner did the revolutionary movement develop sharply in Italy than there was to be seen an enormous increase in the number of Catholic unions, while the employers mobilized their ranks to struggle against the rule of the workers. The membership of the Italian Confederation of Workers jumped from two hundred thousand in 1919 to a million and a quarter in 1920.
This movement, however, soon receded. The Catholic unions were not capable of prevailing, although it is true that the Catholic unions in Italy well prepared the way for the fascist unions which were to follow.
First of all, the fight was no longer on the economic front, but was a matter of who was to rule the country. Secondly, the ideology of Christian Socialism rendered it unfit to meet the violent problems of the hour. Once the fascists took power, they built their own organizations, and the special Catholic unions were forced to disappear, shrinking to one hundred and eighty thousand members in 1925 and further downward until they are practically non-existent today.
Brutal fascist unions and humanitarian guild unions were blood brothers in their undying hatred of Marxism and the class struggle, and in their support of capitalist property and class collaboration. If, then, we ask why the Catholic unions had to be reformed into fascist organizations, we must consider the different character of the epochs which necessitated these two groups. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Marxism was to be fought by means of social reforms; against the theory of revolution by violence there was to be inculcated the doctrine of peaceful persuasion. The Catholic Church was an excellent instrument for this propaganda, since for centuries it had constantly told the poor to “turn the other cheek” and to “render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s.” Thus Christian Socialism was useful in demoralizing the ranks of the workers and depriving them of militancy. After the World War, however, a different task confronted the employers. Platitudinous discussion had to give way to the methods of castor oil, bayonet, and terror. The Catholic Church gladly turned over its organizations to the fascists for this new purpose, so that a more appropriate program could be worked out in the light of the exigencies of the times.
4
In England, too, about the middle of the nineteenth century, the Catholics developed a social action movement, under the leadership of Bishop Manning. This was, of course, supplementary to the Protestant Christian Socialism of Maurice and Kingsley, and was created from the same milieu.
Bishop Manning pretended to be greatly contemptuous of the “talking mill” at Westminster and declared his politics were social politics. Labor was the cause of wealth and was a state of dignity. As such, labor was entitled not only to the rights of property but also to the rights of liberty and the right to protect itself. Manning recognized the right to strike, “as frequently the only weapon in the hands of the workers strong enough to rebuke the despotism of capital.” (*48)
The outbursts of Manning were more radical than those of the Catholics in Europe. The Catholic Church in Great Britain was such an insignificant minority that it had to use more radical phrases to win popularity. Thus Manning talked of the right to strike, a factor carefully denounced in the Catholic circles on the Continent. Also, in England the strike was far removed from revolution, while on the Continent strikes too often were connected with threats against the State, which itself might be Catholic. Manning had not the identical concern in the protection of the anti-Catholic State in Great Britain that the Catholics had in Europe.
The social Catholic movement did not develop strongly in England, not only because it could not win the sympathy of the ruling groups who were strongly dominated by Liberalism and did not believe revolution was near, but because, on the other hand, the social Catholics could not become popular with the British workers. In recent years, the Catholic Social Guild did its utmost to break the 1926 general strike of British labor.
Connected with the theories of the social Catholic movement was the Guild Socialist grouping that arose in Great Britain. The extreme Right Wing of this hodgepodge group was represented by A. J. Penty, a disciple of the Social Catholics.
To Penty, the Middle ages was one of real enlightenment; he actually believed society could and should revert to and restore those model times. (*49) The materialist conception was one-sided, and the theory of class war utterly false. Christianity would restore the sense of brotherhood and bring back the guilds, each with its “just price.” The great evil of mankind was capitalism. By a return to the Catholic Church and to the medieval view of reciprocal rights and duties, by renouncing modern intellectualism, by concentrating on the revival of a prosperous peasantry, England would be restored to her former virility.
Industrialism had brought in a standard of quantity. Penty wanted to return to the standard of quality. (*50) By no means did the present represent any progress over the past. We must return again to a program based on the law of nature and justice, with its just and fixed price and elimination of usury. We must fuse again spirit and matter, and bring the kingdom of heaven to earth. The great question of the day was “… how to make Christians understand what is true in socialism, and socialists to understand the truth of Christianity.” (*51) This was the task of the Guild Socialists. There could be no doubt that the struggles of the future would be between Marx and the guilds. (*52)
According to Penty, “Materialist communism is a contradiction in terms. Communism is a spiritual idea. It is only possible with people who put spiritual things first.” (*53) And against the theory of bolshevism, which idolizes machinery and transforms a nation into a mechanism of robots, Penty would take us back to the old days of crafts and handicrafts. His program called for protection of industry, national self-sufficiency, a regulated industry, and the revival of agriculture. Especially this last was important, since if England was to produce its own food supply, it would not need such a big navy; the present navy was proof that free trade was not the support of pacifism, but led to war.
The only alternative to Marxism was a return to the principles of Christianity. Human nature must be recognized for what it is, the eternity of private property must be respected, self-interest must be accepted as a fact, but society must limit it. This was the principle of the guilds in the Middle Ages, when prices and wages were fixed and property more evenly distributed.
The reactionary plans of these guild socialists can be seen in Penty’s program which called for a restriction of the use of machinery where it conflicted with the needs of personality. The application of machinery which could create economic disorder by unemployment should be prevented as conflicting with the claims of the crafts and arts. No overproduction should be tolerated. England should return to the theory of the small workshop. (*54)
In their insistence on the organization of guilds to take in all employees, and in their idea of social responsibility and regulation, the guild socialists showed how closely they stemmed from the romantic feudalist school of Carlyle. At the same time, in their demands for a self-sufficient nation and empire, they easily became the tools of modern imperialist industry. As the Guild Socialist movement died out, its theories were taken over partially by the fascists, with the primary difference that, whereas, as was usual for the reactionists before the war, the guildsman had appealed for peaceful methods, the fascists envisaged the realization of guilds through violence.
One of the contributions of the guild socialists was to insist upon the abolition of the territorial parliament and the establishment of a State represented by occupations organized in guilds and corporations. By the Right Wing this theory was interpreted similarly to the fascist practice. To the Left Wing, however, it appeared as a policy more revolutionary than that of the other socialists, since it closely resembled “self-government in industry.” The Left Wing was particularly active in the trade union movement, but soon became split on the question of the future relationship of the workers’ organizations to the State.
Hobson, one of the Left Wing leaders, held to the view that the State was to hold the final authority over industrial affairs and would be the owner of the tools of production, handing them over to the guilds as trustees, but remaining the final court of appeal. The State would retain the power to tax. This theory was opposed to the guild-commune theory of Cole, who denied sovereignty to the State and would establish local and regional communes under the workers control.
In this respect, Cole posed as a harbinger for the British trade union movement which, immediately following the war, through the Miners Federation of Great Britain, had advanced a demand for the creation of a Miners’ Council to be composed half of workers’ organizations and half of the capitalist groups which controlled mining, but had said nothing about nationalization of the mines. In 1925 the British Labor Party made a similar proposal to the Samuel Commission, with the difference, however, that the members of the Miners’ Council were to be individuals rather than delegates from organizations. Cole interpreted these actions to mean that modern socialists had abandoned their previous advocacy of direct government ownership and were stressing only workers’ control, and thus were becoming more in harmony with the basic program of this Wing of the guild socialists.
The Cole group of guild socialists had steadfastly countered the collectivism of those who demanded that industries should be administered by civil service and should be nationalized. Instead, Cole called for self-government in industry and for an industrial government to be based on the direct representation of the workers. The guild socialist advocated “that the State should acquire the ownership of industry, but should hand over its administration, under a charter, to a Guild composed of the whole body of workers engaged in it. (*55)
Here, then, was a modern question which had been opened up by the guild socialists: Should the workers of each particular industry be the ones to administer that industry, or should the State as a whole take charge? The decentralized system proposed by Cole was not far from that advocated by the communist anarchists of Italy. On the other hand, the whole socialist movement previously had urged the nationalization of industry, the workers to control it through their control of the State. When revolution broke out in Russia, the 1920 conference of the guild socialists welcomed the soviet system, but would not bind themselves to the Russian formulas. The soviet system, indeed, was a distinct repudiation of the idea that each set of workers should control their own factory and their own industry. The workers controlled all through their State.
In their controversies with the opportunist socialists who called for nationalization of industry, however, it cannot be said that the guild socialists were less correct than the others. It is true that the nationalization of industry is the development of State capitalism, which in turn brings all the contradictions of society to a head and paves the way for a new social order. But it is extremely questionable whether it is the function of the socialists to bolster up the authority of the capitalist State by advocating today such measures as nationalization of industry, even though the socialists add the additional demand of “workers’ control” or “democratic management.” Those very socialists who have so warmly advocated the nationalization of industry invariably have revealed themselves as counter-revolutionists in the period of active labor struggle. Especially opportunist was the joining of the idea of nationalization to the belief in the perpetuation of the parliamentary State as the finest expression of pure democracy.
The Left Wing guild socialists also advocated the reorganization of unions on an industrial basis, and the abolition of craft unionism. While they would not indorse the militancy of the shop-steward movement that arose after the war, they did not disapprove of that form of organization. The workers must found their own unions for the control of industry and the establishment of industrial democracy. However, Cole did not believe in direct action, while Hobson wanted to buy out capitalism.
On the whole, the literary guildsman of the Left Wing who found it so convenient to unite with the Catholic reactionists of the Penty school, played a very slight part in influencing the labor movement. After the war their views died to a whisper.
Footnotes
1. R. H. Tawney: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, pp. 149-150.
2. The same, p. 114.
3. See the Monograph by G. Schmoller: The Mercantile System and Its Historical Significance.
4. See, R. Pascal: The Social Basis of the German Reformation, p. 146.
5. Calvin: Institute of the Christian Religion, Bk. IV, Ch. XX, paragraph 25.
6. Among both the Spanish Catholic theologians and the French Huguenots there was often expressed the view that subjects were not bound to obey a prince who enjoined what was contrary to the law of God, since kings do not rule according to divine right. Tyrannicide was thus justifiable. See, for example: S. T. Brutus: Grounds of Right Against Tyrants (1579); George Buchanan: On the Sovereign Power Among the Scots (1579), and the writings of Mariana, Suarez and other Spanish theologians, for which also see, W. A. Dunning: Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu.
7. Machiavelli: Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Book I, Ch. XII, p. 130 in Historical, Political, and Diplomatic Writings of Machiavelli, II. (1882, Boston edition.) See also F. P. Sterns: Napoleon and Machiavelli, p. 115.
8. Indeed, the 1928 Paris edition of Machiavelli’s Prince contains a special introduction by Mussolini.
9. See, W. A. Dunning: A History of Political Theories, Ancient and Medieval, p. 321 (1935). See also, Machiavelli: Discourse, work cited, Book III, Ch. XVI.
10. T. Hobbes: Leviathan in Collected Works, III, 115. (Molesworth edition.)
11. The same, p. 115.
12. In all this, Hobbes seemed to have followed the materialistic Franciscan Englishman, Duns Scotus, who died in the fourteenth century. To Duns Scotus, “Individual property had its source neither in divine nor natural law, but in Civil Law, and was the consequence of the Fall from Grace. Men were seized with the lust for domination and riches, a war of all against all arose, as each one aimed at taking as much as he could from the common possession. Thus the State and private property were established.” (M. Beer: Social Struggles in the Middle Ages, p. 110.)
13. Leslie Stephen: Hobbes, p. 204.
14. Freedom is not contrary to necessity but works through it. God is free yet operates according to the necessity of his own nature. See B. de Spinoza: Political Treatise in Works, I, Ch. II, Sec. 7, p. 294. (Bohn edition, 1889.)
15. B. de Spinoza: Ethics, Book IV, Proposition 54. (Everyman’s edition)
16. B. de Spinoza: A Theologico-Political Treatise in Works I, 245. (Bohn edition, 1889.)
17. His book was written 1566.
18. E. Neff: Carlyle and Mill, p. 246.
It should be remarked that an intolerable situation had been created in England at this time by the fact that while the hours of slave labor were limited, those of wage labor were unlimited and, when the workers in England were forced to labor fourteen hours a day, in 1831, an order of council had forbidden the labor of slaves more than nine hours, night work and child labor being abolished. Thus the slave was better off than the “free” laborer.
19. To Carlyle, the essence of freedom was the right of the masses to be adequately led. The masses needed a true leader, Laissez faire was an abdication on the part of the governors. Democracy was, by the nature of it a self-cancelling business, and gave, in the long run, the net result of zero. (T. Carlyle: Chartism.)
20. See, B. Disraeli: Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, II, 572. (1851 edition.)
21. F. Rowe: The Social Philosophy of Carlyle and Ruskin, p. 111.
22. Carlyle: Past and Present, pp. 329-330. (A. L. Burt edition, 1890.)
23. Carlyle: The Socialism and Unsocialism of Thomas Carlyle, I, 30. (1891 edition.)
24. E. Neff: Carlyle and Mill, p. 327.
25. See, D. B. Cofer: Saint-Simonism in the Radicalism of Thomas Carlyle.
26. See, T. Carlyle: Past and Present, Book IV, Section “Horoscope.”
27. C. Brinton: The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists, p. 84.
28. See, E. Seligman: “Owen and the Christian Socialists,” in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. I, pp. 206-249 (1886).
29. A. V. Woodworth: Christian Socialism in England, p. 39.
30. G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 41. (J. Sibree edition.)
31. L. T. Hobhouse: The Metaphysical Theory of the State, p. 100.
“In the German view the state is not for the individuals, but the individuals for the state.” The German creed is that not the enjoyment of happiness, but the fulfillment of duties is the real meaning of human existence. Life is worth while only if we serve ideas and if we are ready to sacrifice everything for them.” (H. Muensterberg: The War and America, p. 135.)
32. See, M. Beer: Social Struggles and Thought, pp. 94-95.
33. W. H. Dawson: German Socialism and Ferdinand Lasselle, pp. 51-52.
34. See, M. Beer: Social Struggles and Modern Socialism, pp. 110-111.
35. See, F. Nitti: Catholic Socialism, p. 78.
36. F. Nitti: Catholic Socialism, pp. 133-134.
37. See, K. Rodbertus: Overproduction and Crises, p. 70 and following (1898 Julia Franklin translation).
38. See, M. Beer: Social Struggles and Modern Socialism, p. 101.
39. W. H. Dawson: Bismarck and State Socialism, p. 74.
40. F. Nitti: Catholic Socialism, p. 173.
41. P. T. Moon, The Labor Problem and the Social Catholic Movement in France, p. 33.
42. See, S. Bernstein: The Beginnings of Marxian Socialism in France, p. 2.
43. The same, p. 189.
44. The same, pp. 85-86.
45. This has not been the position of the Catholic Church in the United States, however, where it has been a principled opponent to legislation prohibiting child labor.
46. More recently there has been added another encyclical along the same line, the Quadregesimo Anno ("Reconstructing the Social Order"), May, 1931.
47. F. Pitigliani: The Italian Corporative State, p. 10.
48. G. P. McEntee: The Social Catholic Movement in Great Britain, p. 25.
49. A. J. Penty: A Guildsman’s interpretation of History, p. 298 and following.
50. A. J. Penty: Means and Ends, pp. 82-83.
51. A. J. Penty: Towards a Christian Sociology, p. 18.
52. A. J. Penty: Guilds and the Social Crisis, p. 77.
53. A. J. Penty: Communism and the Alternative, p. 50.
54. See A. J. Penty: Communism and the Alternative, p. 121 and following.
55. G. D. H. Cole: Modern Theories and Forms of Industrial Organization, p. 66.