The Proud Tower (74 page)

His succession went to neither of the two chief contenders, Walter Long, representing the landed gentry, nor Austen Chamberlain, who canceled each other out, but to Bonar Law, a Glasgow steel manufacturer, born a Canadian, who read the newspapers regularly, ate meals of vegetables, milk and rice pudding and had the backing of another of the adventurers, his fellow Canadian Max Aitken, soon to be Lord Beaverbrook.

Balfour’s departure inspired floods of press comment and political gossip and an impeccable tribute from Asquith to “the most distinguished member of the greatest deliberative body in the world.” George Wyndham, rather more sour if more genuine, thought Balfour’s refusal to fight was in character, arising from indifference which came from taking “too scientific a view of politics.” “He knows,” said Wyndham, “that there was once an ice age and that there will be an ice age again.”

^*
The call for a vote, which is taken by division, that is, a physical separation of members into their respective lobbies.

8
The Death of Jaurès
THE SOCIALISTS : 1890–1914

8
The Death of Jaurès

S
OCIALISM
was international. Its name as an organized movement, the Second International Workingmen’s Association, said so. Its anthem, “The International,” affirmed it and promised besides that “tomorrow the International will be the human race.” Its founding Congress of 1889 had as joint presidents a Frenchman and a German, Edouard Vaillant and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Its membership at its height represented the Socialist parties of thirty-three nations and would-be nations, including Germany, France, England, Austria, Hungary and Bohemia, Russia, Finland, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Serbia, Bulgaria, India, Japan, Australia and the United States. Its flag was a solid red representing the blood of Everyman. Its essential thesis was that the class solidarity of workingmen transcended national frontiers in a horizontal division of society. Its holiday set aside the first of May to demonstrate proletarian brotherhood. Its slogan was “Workers of the World, Unite!”

Whether or not miners, factory hands, farm labourers, servants and other members of the working class, in whose interest Socialism existed, felt themselves to be international, their leaders believed it, practiced it, counted on it. At the Amsterdam Socialist Congress which took place in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian and Japanese delegates, Plekhanov and Katayama, were seated side by side. When the two men clasped hands, all 450 delegates rose to their feet in a tribute of thunderous applause. When Plekhanov and Katayama each made a speech declaring that the war had been forced upon his country by capitalism and was not a matter of the Japanese people fighting the Russian people, they were listened to in “almost religious silence” and sat down amid cheers.

Socialism was equally predicated on the concept of class war and on its eventual outcome, the destruction of capitalism. It regarded both the ruling class and the bourgeoisie as the enemy. The sentiment was reciprocated. The word “Socialist” had a ring of blood and terror, like “Jacobin” of the old days. During the quarter century following its founding in Paris in 1889 on the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, the Second International inspired growing apprehension in the ruling class. Vienna was “paralyzed with fright” when Viktor Adler, the Austrian Socialist leader, called for a one-day general strike and mass demonstrations throughout the Empire on the first May Day to demonstrate the workers’ united strength. When Adler announced a workers’ parade down the chestnut-bordered Prater where usually only the carriages of the wealthy appeared, the rich and their allies trembled, expecting the rabble would set houses on fire, plunder shops, and commit unimaginable atrocities on their march. Merchants let down their iron shutters, parents forbade children to go out of doors, police were posted at every street corner, troops were held in reserve. The bourgeoisie saw spreading before their feet what Henry George had called in
Progress and Poverty
“the open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society.” They were made aware of the rising threat “of the House of Want upon the House of Have.”

When the Second International was founded, the twelve-hour day and seven-day week were normal for unorganized labour. Sunday rest and the ten- or nine-hour day were the hard-won privileges of skilled labour in the craft unions, which represented barely one-fifth of the labour force. In 1899 Edwin Markham, struck by the bent brute figure of Millet’s “Man with the Hoe,” expressed both society’s fear and responsibility in a poem named for the picture:

Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World, A protest that is also prophecy.…

How will the Future reckon with this Man
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds and rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with the kingdoms and the kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God
After the silence of the centuries?

In 1899, when poetry still spoke to the public, Markham’s poem caused a sensation. Newspapers throughout America reprinted it, editorials discussed it, clergymen used it as a text, school children studied it, debating societies debated it, and commentators called it “the cry of the
zeitgeist
” and, next to Kipling’s “Recessional,” the most “meaningful poem of the age.”

The public conscience which responded to an artist’s vision and a poet’s words was frightened and angry when confronted with the real thing. When in 1891 the textile workers of Fourmies, a small industrial town in northern France, organized a May Day demonstration for the eight-hour day, police charged their parade and in the ensuing melee killed ten people, including several children. “Take care!” warned Clemenceau in the Chamber. “The dead are strong persuaders. One must pay attention to the dead.… I tell you that the primary fact of politics today is the inevitable revolution which is preparing.… The Fourth Estate is rising and reaching for the conquest of power. One must take sides. Either you meet the Fourth Estate with violence or you welcome it with open arms. The moment has come to choose.”

There was little disposition toward open arms. When the Socialist leaders and unions of Belgium, after two previous bloody attempts, succeeded in 1893 in organizing a general strike for equal manhood suffrage, the essential precondition for the conquest of power, soldiers killed twelve before the strike ended. When the Pullman strike in the United States in 1894 stopped trains and the mail, Judge William Howard Taft of Cincinnati, far from a ferocious man, wrote to his wife, “It will be necessary for the military to kill some of the mob before the trouble can be stayed. They have only killed six … as yet. This is hardly enough to make an impression.” Here was the class war in operation.

Socialism’s ultimate aim was the abolition of private property and the redistribution of the world’s goods to provide everybody with enough. The goal was the same as that of Anarchism; what caused the permanent conflict between the two groups was that the Socialists believed in organization and political action to achieve it.

Collective ownership was the answer of both to the terrible riddle posed by the Nineteenth Century: that the greater the material progress, the wider and deeper the resulting poverty. Marx drew from the riddle the central theme of his system: that this inherent contradiction within capitalism would bring about its breakdown. He proved it from the economic analysis of history. The effect of the Industrial Revolution had been to transform the worker from an independent producer who owned his own tools into a factory hand, a propertyless, destitute member of society, dependent for his livelihood on the capitalist who owned the means of production. Through the capitalist’s accumulation of profits derived from the surplus value of the worker’s product, the exploiters were becoming richer and the exploited poorer. The process could only end in the violent collapse of the existing order. Trained in class consciousness and prepared for this event, the working class would, at the moment of ripeness, rise in revolution to usher in the new order.

This Marxian doctrine of
Verelendung
(pauperization, or increasing misery) and
Zusammenbruch
(collapse) was the religious formula of Socialism, equivalent to “God is One” of another religion. It afflicted Socialism and the labour movement with a chronic schism between the necessity of collapse and revolution on the one hand and the possibility of gradual reform of the existing order on the other. As a schism between the future Absolute and the present Possible, it was present from birth, when the founders of 1889 split into two Congresses over the issue whether to permit cooperation with the bourgeois political parties. The true Marxists accused the French Possibilists of lying in wait at the Paris railroad stations to lead unsuspecting delegates from the provinces to the wrong Congress. Throughout the next twenty-five years the schism affected every act, decision and formulation of policy in the working-class movement, dividing negotiated gains from uncompromising class war, pragmatists from theorists, trade unions from parliamentary parties, the workers themselves, who wanted improvements in wages, hours and safety today, from the leaders, who agitated in their behalf for political power tomorrow.

The Marxian premise built into Socialism a chronic dilemma as well as a schism. As a movement on behalf of the working class it needed working-class support, which could only be obtained by showing practical results. Yet every practical result slowed or arrested the process of impoverishment. When walking with a friend who reached in his pocket to give money to a beggar, Johannes Miquel, in his youth an ardent Socialist, stopped him, saying, “Don’t delay the Revolution!” This was the logical extreme of Marxism. Any reform inferred a common ground between the contesting classes; revolution assumed the absence of it. If there was no common ground, what then was the use of anything short of revolution? Orthodox Socialists skirted this gaping hole in the creed by contending that reforms should continue to be wrung from the possessing class in order to strengthen the workers for the final struggle. The several national parties always stated a minimum program of reforms to be obtained within the existing system and a maximum program for the destruction of capitalism and triumph of the class struggle. Increasingly the moderates, or “opportunists,” as their opponents called them, concentrated on the minimum program and the acquisition of political power necessary to put it through, while the orthodox refused to concede that any interim successes interfered with the truth of “increasing misery.”

On the final necessity of revolution the Socialist party programs were imprecise. They glossed over it both in order to appeal to the voters and because it remained a disputable point. Socialism was not a hard gemlike doctrine impervious to modification, but varied, depending on time, country, situation and faction. Whether or not a Socialist believed in revolution was largely a matter of temperament. For some it was “nothing if not revolution.” For others what counted was the Socialist millennium, however achieved. For the orthodox Marxist, in any case, collapse was ineluctable and Capitalism not a system to be modified but an Enemy to be destroyed, a living tyrant armed with the weapons of its class: courts, army, judges, legislature, police, injunctions, lockouts.

Property had lasted too long, filling the world with wickedness, turning men against each other. The time for overturn had come. The social evils produced by capitalism—poverty, ignorance, racial prejudice and war, which was just another form of capitalist exploitation—would be wiped out and replaced by social harmony. Freed from false patriotism, workingmen linked by their underlying brotherhood would no longer fight each other. Freed from the greeds and frustrations imposed by capitalism, every individual could pursue “the unimpaired development of his personality,” being guaranteed under the collective system sufficient means and liberty to achieve it.

As the chariot of a new and higher order of life, Socialism seemed to its advocates to carry a sacred trust and to impose upon them a moral duty to be worthy of the ideal. Because he believed drinking was disgracing and destroying the working classes, Viktor Adler adopted total abstinence to set a personal example. Socialism was the repository of the big words. When, as a student in Brussels, Angelica Balabanov, a young Russian revolutionary, listened to Socialist orators in the Belgian Parliament, “Parliament seemed to me then a sacred place where Science, Truth and Justice … were to conquer the forces of Tyranny and Oppression for the working class.”

The goal gave an excitement, a meaning, a glow to Socialist lives which for many of them substituted for the usual drives of personal ambition and profit. Party militants and organizers in the early days worked for nothing. Since there was no money in the movement, there could be no corruption. Since it could offer no livelihood or gain, its leaders tended to be idealists. It was a cause, not a career. It gave its disciples something to work for and infused a passion which could be understood across the barrier of language. At one Socialist Congress the Spanish leader Pablo Iglesias spoke so eloquently in his native tongue that although the audience did not understand a word, they burst into frequent applause. To the workers who increasingly voted for it, in millions after the turn of the century, Socialism gave self-respect and an identity. A workingman could feel himself no longer an ignored anonymous member of a herd but a citizen with a place in society and a political affiliation of his own. Unlike Anarchism, Socialism gave him a party to belong to and, since the nettle of revolution did not have to be grasped, an acceptable way to reach the goal instead of by way of the lawless deed.